Hi, my name is Matt, and I have a storage problem.
Solid-state drives are so cheap right now that I can’t stop myself from buying them, and there will almost certainly be even better SSD deals around Amazon Prime Day. Someone hold my credit card.
I bought a 2TB Intel 660p from Newegg last year around Black Friday for $249 (along with a 2TB Crucial MX500 for $208). And when Amazon briefly had the 2TB 660p for sale from a third-party seller a couple weeks ago for a too-good-to-be-true $103, I couldn’t stop myself from clicking the buy button once again.
After receiving that drive yesterday, I’m relieved to confirm I wasn’t scammed. The Amazon stork dropped off my second 2TB QLC baby factory sealed and secured in the box. And after I busted it open, it benched with the same performance as my first bouncing 2TB NVMe baby. Now my first-born 512GB Samsung 960 Pro boot drive is a little jealous of the new twins.
As I wrote last year, hard drives are dead to me, and I’m never looking back. My home desktop currently has 3.5TB of solid-state storage, and I now have 4TB more that I could install, if I had spare M.2 slots or room to wedge a PCIe M.2 card in my Micro-ATX motherboard between my bulky 2.5-slot Aorus 1080 Ti graphics card.
Right now, one of those 2TB drives is housed in a MyDigitalSSD external enclosure, and I’m still trying to figure out what to do with the new one. Start building a new AMD Ryzen 3000 PC? Buy a new laptop that supports NVMe drives and swap out the skimpy pre-installed boot drive? I’m sure I’ll think of something, and I’m sure it won’t be friendly to my credit card.
Clearly, I have my storage needs covered--and then some. But if you’re after a new SSD (or three), there’s never been a better time to buy. And with aging flagship drives cluttering up shelves and prices continuing to slip (not to mention PCIe 4.0 drives arriving soon), sites like Amazon and Newegg seem desperate to move their stock.
So expect to see some great deals around Prime Day (plus a few days before and after) on solid-state drives from the likes of Adata, intel, Crucial, Samsung and others. I don’t know if we’ll see the kind of crazy deal I got on the 660p from the third-party seller (just over 5 cents a gig!), but it’s certainly possible. I’ve already noticed some SATA drives from the likes of Team Group and other, lesser-known SSD makers slipping below 8 cents a gig.
We’ll be tracking the hottest SSD deals for you on our Best Deals on SSD and Storage page. To make you’re actually getting a good deal, you can check out my How to Tell an SSD Prime Day Deal From a Solid-State Dud article and general shopping tips from our SSD Buying Guide.
So pay attention in the coming days if you’re after a sweet deal on speedy solid-state storage. There will probably be more than a few sales worth snatching up. Just don’t tell me about it. I’m off the hard stuff for good--or at least until I find a deal on a new PCIe 4.0 drive. Do you still have my credit card?
Note: As with all of our op-eds, the opinions expressed here belong to the writer alone and not Tom's Hardware as a team.
