One of the largest-capacity SSDs you can get at a realistic price, for use in a gaming PC, is now more accessible than ever, thanks to a new low-price discount. If you need a single high-capacity drive for systems with limited M.2 slots or shared PCIe lanes, opting for a large SSD like this is a great choice. You shouldn't have any issues squeezing in the bloated file sizes of the latest Call of Duty game, or just installing all of your most recently played games on just the one drive. This deal isn't aimed at anyone building a budget PC, as the over-$500 price tag is still a large outlay. However, it's no longer more expensive to buy one of these large 8TB drives over two smaller 4TB SSDs.
Today's deal sees the 8TB WD Black SN850X fall to $539.99 at Amazon. This is virtually identical to buying two 4TB SN850Xs at their current cost of $269.99 each. Just one of these SSDs will beef up the storage capacity of your system for anything from game installs to large video files. The WD Black SN850X is one of the best SSDs for gaming and the PS5, with transfer speeds that almost max out the PCIe Gen 4.0 bandwidth.
Originally a definite halo-tier product with its $899.99 price tag, the 8TB SN850X was out of reach for a lot of PC builders, especially considering you could pick up smaller variants of the same drive for a fraction of the price. But now that it is within just a few cents or so of two smaller capacity drives, that gap has closed. I would still love to see this drive come down a lot more in price to make it more affordable, but it is heading in the right direction. This is the ideal drive solution for PC builds with limited M.2 SSD slots that require a lot of storage capacity.
We reviewed the 8TB WD Black SN850X and found that this no-compromise SSD performed excellently, with sequential read and write speeds of 7,200 MB/s and 6,600 MB/s, respectively. There's a slight drop in write speed, from 100 MB/s to 90 MB/s, compared to the smaller capacity SN850X SSDs available, but an increase in random write IOPS to 100K. The 8TB SN850X uses Kioxia 162-Layer TLC (BiCS6) flash memory and the proprietary Triton MP16+ B2 controller.
Using the 3D Storage Benchmark test to measure real-world gaming performance, there was effectively no change in 3DMark when comparing the 2TB to the 8TB WD SN850X. A good thing, as some drives in the past could lose performance at very high capacities. Performance here is good for a PCIe 4.0 drive, only really surpassed by the 4TB 990 Pro and T500, and naturally, the much faster PCIe 5.0 T700 drive.
If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.
