Tell game-install-size inflation to sod off with the 1TB WD Blue SN850 SSD, now £47 / $55 for Black Friday

That’s the cheapest this fast PCIe 4.0 drive has been in ages

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

Recently, PC games have been gorging themselves silly on our storage space. 160GB for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2? 190GB for God of War Ragnarok? If these games were people they’d stand waiting at the Pizza Hut buffet and nab ten of the twelve slices of Pepperoni Feast as soon as they’re slid under the heatlamps. What to do? For our part, there’s little we can do except upgrade capacity, and there are few better ways to do that on a budget than with the WD Blue SN580. It’s a cheap yet fast PCIe 4.0 SSD, which the Black Friday sales have knocked down to £47 / $55 for 1TB.

I had this on our best SSDs list for ages, only recently replacing it with the newer Blue SN5000, and even that doesn’t have quite the sheer thrift appeal as the Blue SN850 had. And still does, evidently. Not only is this an affordable SSD, it’s also a relatively nippy one for its price class, so will still provide the kind of cut-down load times you’d want and expect from solid state storage. In both the UK and US, the 1TB model has also been slashed to its lowest prices since October 2023.

UK deals:

US deals:

Driven largely by a bunch of AI nonsense, skyrocketing demand for flash storage has in turn forced consumer SSDs to spend most of 2024 with their prices in the clouds. I’m already sick of writing about Black Friday (and I’m sure a lot of you are sick of reading about it), but if it can restore some economic sanity to this vital corner of PC gaming hardware, then at least that’s something.