Best early Prime Day deals on SSDs and storage

The balance between demand and supply has shifted—with fewer drives on the market, prices drifted up over 2024. (Black Friday 2023 marked the end of a golden era.) The deals picked for this roundup may not always match those incredible 2023 prices, but they do hit a low for the period since the cost increases.

Yes, but only to a point. Major manufacturers are generally reliable—think Samsung, Crucial, Western Digital (aka WD), SK Hynix, Corsair, Kingston, and even newer players like TeamGroup and Solidigm. Outside of that, you may be playing a bit fast and loose with your data’s longevity.

However, everyone has that one horror story about a hard-disk drive that failed, and why they’ll never use, say, WD or Crucial again. That’s less commonly a manufacturing error, and more so a matter of luck. No drive is guaranteed to meet its life expectancy, which is why you should perform regular backups.

SSDs are faster and take less room in a PC than a hard-disk drive (HDD), which gives them a strong edge. If you only have one storage drive in your PC, it should ideally be an SSD so you get faster boot times and quicker access to your files. A HDD as your primary drive will feel much slower.

But HDDs still have their advantages. First, they’re much cheaper. The going price of a 2TB HDD is about the same as the sale price for a 1TB SSD. You also can get them in higher capacities than SSDs. If you work with huge files, you can pick up an 18TB or 20TB HDD (and as mentioned, since HDD cost less, you’ll spend as much or even less as a 4TB SSD). If you need secondary storage and you don’t need it to be fast, HDDs are a fantastic option.

Here’s the guideline we use for picking deals: First, it should be for an SSD that performs well (or in select cases, performs well for its MSRP), and is a reasonable price when not on sale. The discount should also be significant for that particular model. Ex: For SSDs that almost never go on sale, a reduction of $5 to $10 is already hefty. For others, that might be closer to $20 to $30.

In other words, expect to pick up high-performing drives at an all-time low (or very close to that) during a Prime Day sale. Ignore the options that don’t meet this criteria.

Possibly. As of this article’s publishing, the Trump administration intends to reinstate high tariffs on goods from many countries, which could impact SSDs. If implemented, costs could increase in the second part of 2025. The smartest strategy is to buy now if you know you need the upgrade soon, especially on any discounted drives that you like.