Best early October Prime Day deals on SSDs and storage | usagoldmines.com

The balance between demand and supply has shifted. Most recently, data centers have begun buying up SSDs, shrinking the number of drives available to consumers. But while you can’t expect to see the incredible prices of 2023, deal periods like Prime Day help counteract 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.

Tariffs have caused small increases on computer components, but SSD pricing has been more affected by data centers. Demand has grown enough that supply available to consumers have shrunk, driving up prices. That said, tariffs could begin to affect SSDs and storage more notably after the holidays, which is when retailers’ pre-tariff stockpiles of goods is expected to run out—which means any new stock imported into the U.S. will be taxed at higher rates.