Grab a WD Black or Samsung 990 Pro gaming SSD for a bargain price, but be quick

Both the WD Black SN850X and Samsung 990 Pro are on offer for Amazon Prime Day, enabling you to get a fast new PCIe 4.0 SSD on the cheap.

Amazon Prime Day is here, and it’s kicked off with some great deals on these PCIe 4.0 gaming SSD models. If you’ve been holding off from buying a new SSD, biding your time until prices come down, then now is the moment to go in for the kill. Both the Samsung 990 Pro and WD Black SN850X are on offer currently, with prices starting at just $79.99, so now is a great time to not only speed up your storage, but also get some more space for your game library.

In fact, that WD drive is happily sitting at the top of our guide to the best gaming SSD, as our favorite overall choice. It offers decent bang per buck at its usual price of $114.99 for a 1TB drive, as we found in our WD Black SN850X review, but at $79.99 (£69.99) it’s an absolute bargain for the performance on offer.

Not only does it offer super-fast sequential read speeds of 6,973MB/s in our tests, but we also found its game mode genuinely reduced game load speed times, hitting an amazing load speed of 965MB/s in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and 1,154MB/s in Battlefield V. Click on this link to go to the offer for the 1TB drive.

The 2TB version of this drive is also on offer right now for $139.64, but at this price we’d instead go for the 2TB Samsung 990 Pro with a heatsink.

The latter is currently going for just $139.99 right now, and it’s Samsung’s current fastest SSD. In fact, in terms of raw performance, the Samsung 990 Pro is the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD we’ve ever tested, hitting an incredible sequential read speed of 7,198MB/s in our test rig. The Samsung 990 Pro is also compatible with the PlayStation 5, as well as PCs.

The above might not be as fast as the latest PCIe 5.0 drives, such as the Crucial T705, but it’s still plenty fast enough, plus this drive is massively cheaper than PCIe 5.0 options and it runs much cooler too. Unlike the Samsung 980 Pro, the 990 Pro also has a fast write speed, hitting 6,754MB/s, compared to just 4,913MB/s on the 980 Pro.

Speaking of which, this drive also comes with a stylish red and black Samsung heatsink to keep it in check when it’s running at full pelt. If you can afford it, the 4TB version of this drive is also on offer at the moment for just $279.99, which works out at just $69.99 per terabyte – that’s amazing value for a drive that runs at this speed.

Both these drives will work in any 2280 NVMe M.2 slot on your motherboard, but you’ll need at least a 4x PCIe 4.0 slot for them to run at full speed, and they will also run at full speed in a PCIe 5.0 slot, if you don’t already have a super-fast PCIe 5.0 drive.

If you’ve never upgraded your storage before, check out our guide on how to install an SSD, where we run you through the whole process.

How do I get the best Prime Day deals?

To benefit from Amazon Prime Day PC hardware deals, you need to sign up for an Amazon Prime membership. Join Amazon Prime here and get a free 30-day trial if you haven’t done so before.

For more bargains, check out our Amazon Prime Day deals hub if you want to be sure you can get all the best deals in the big sale season.