This is the cheapest 1TB NVMe SSD you can buy right now

WD Blue SN550 1TB — (Image credit: Western Digital)

In a perfect world, we'd all have massive PCIe 4.0 SSDs in our PCs and storage would never be an issue ever again. Unfortunately, such speedy drives tend to command a premium over their last-generation siblings, meaning compromises have to be made. And while prices have tumbled recently, highlighted by the Crucial P5 that we found recently for a very tempting £112.63, a price drop of £30 on Western Digital's Blue SN550 PCIe 3.0 SSD makes it a very tempting offering.

The 1TB version of the SN550 can be yours for just £59.99 right now, with the 2TB version rolling in at £139.99. It's worth pointing out that this isn't a particularly fast PCIe 3.0 drive, being someway off the interface's limits at 2,400MB/s reads and 1,950MB/s writes, but that's still four to five times the performance you'll get from a SATA drive.

These are great drives for more budget-oriented builds or as secondary storage. It's particularly rare for a 2TB SSD to be anything approaching affordable, but at £140, that 2TB model could well solve a lot of storage problems for years to come.

You'll need to make sure that you have an available M.2 slot in your motherboard, but that's a situation that is getting better and better with each new generation of motherboard—the latest Z690s and X570/B550s have two or three slots. So even if your machine isn't bang up to date, and maybe currently only has a single M.2 slot, there's a good chance that when you do next upgrade, you'll have plenty of space to carry this drive across with you.

Of course, if you're looking for a seriously speedy drive, then you're going to want to look elsewhere, our guide to the best SSDs for gaming is a good place to start. The very fastest drives around offer sequential throughput up to 7.5GB/s, but they do cost a lot more for the privilege. Making this still a deal that's still worth checking out.

Alan has been writing about PC tech since before 3D graphics cards existed, and still vividly recalls having to fight with MS-DOS just to get games to load. He fondly remembers the killer combo of a Matrox Millenium and 3dfx Voodoo, and seeing Lara Croft in 3D for the first time. He's very glad hardware has advanced as much as it has though, and is particularly happy when putting the latest M.2 NVMe SSDs, AMD processors, and laptops through their paces. He has a long-lasting Magic: The Gathering obsession but limits this to MTG Arena these days.