You know those Steam games that you bought seven years ago and swear you'll get to one day? Or those Epic game giveaways that would be cool to try one day? Maybe you'd at least get to them if they were already downloaded to your PC. Maybe you need 4TB of storage.
There are a few 4TB SSD deals we're seeing around for Black Friday, with the opportunity to serve as spacious game drives (or I suppose photos, videos, or other documents if you're more responsible than I am). At the very least, you could install Call of Duty: Modern Warefare 3 and still have room for some other games. Here are several of our top picks.
The Lexar NM790 is down to $187 over at Amazon, and includes a heatsink, making it great for either a PC or a PlayStation 5. In our review, we praised this drive for its power efficiency as well as its sustained performance. Alternatively, the Addlink A39 4TB costs just a bit more at $193 at Amazon.
Both SSDs use the Maxio MAP1602A controller with 232-layer YMTC TLC NAND, which has proved a potent combination even if they're DRAM-less drives. They're also single-sided, which is basically a requirement should you want to stuff an SSD into a thinner laptop, though the heatsinks would need to be removed for laptop use.
Also at Amazon, the 4TB Silicon Power UD90 is down to $162. We reviewed this one, too. For a DRAM-less drive, we appreciated its solid performance. We also praised its power efficiency, though you may want to consider a heatsink, as it can get a bit toasty. This drive isn't as good as the Lexar above — we'd recommend spending a bit more to get that one. But if the difference in price is make or break, you can still do well with it.
All of these drives also implement pSLC (pseudo-SLC) caches, which means they'll have excellent throughput until the cache is filled up. That's usually more than enough space to keep up with any game downloads, though performance can start to trail off as the drives are filled to capacity. The A93 and NM790 have better sustained write performance, which is why we prefer them over the older UD90 — they'll hold up better when you've stuffed them full of games, like a turkey on Thanksgiving.
There are some other deals as well, like the Samsung 990 Pro 4TB for $249. That's a far more reputable brand with better support than you'll get from Addlink, Lexar, Netac, Silicon Power, or a variety of other brands. These drives shouldn't fail, but even if they did, if they're a secondary drive you'd only be losing your game downloads.
Look, 4TB may seem like a lot of space now. But if you have a lot of games, you'll fill it up faster than you expect, especially with the ballooning sizes of major video games these days. I believe in you. You can do it.
