Black Friday SSD and Storage Deals Live: Best Sales on Internal and External Drives

The Fastest USB Stick Around is at an All-Time Low

I absolutely love the SK hynix Tube T31 and have two of them which I use on a regular basis. These have the drive-on-a-stick form factor of a USB Flash drive, but the company touts this as an “external SSD” because of its blazing fast performance.

Whatever you call it, the Tube T31 is the external SSD to get if you want great speeds and a ton of convenience. It has a built-in USB Type-A port that can use a 10 Gbps (USB 3.x Gen 2) port or a regular USB 3 port. It’s rated for up to 1,000 MB/s and now it’s just $59, reduced from $84 for the 1TB model.

When we reviewed the T31, we were impressed with its performance on PC Mark10 where it dominated the competition, coming within just a few points of the Kingston DataTraveler max and Transcend ESD310C.

And we were even more impressed with how it performed on DiskBench, during a 10GB transfer.

What I like about the SK hynix Tube T31 is just how easy it is to carry around and deploy for important tasks. I’ve used it to install Windows on a number of machines or transfer large files from one PC in my home to another. It’s always quick. It feels very sturdy and it just works.

The Best 4TB SSD is Just 6.5 Cents Per GB

Samsung’s 990 Pro is our favorite PCIe 4.0 SSD, thanks to its industry-leading performance and great Samsung software. Other PCIe 4.0 drives like the WD Black SN850X are neck and neck with the 990 Pro, but it’s a perennial favorite, not only because it’s fast, but because people love Samsung.

The 4TB Samsung 990 Pro offers really strong performance; it’s rated for sequential reads and writes of 7,450 and 6,900 MBps along with 1.6 / 1.55 million read and write IOPS. It also promises 2,400 TBW of endurance to go with its 5-year warranty.

Normally, you’d pay $300 or more for the 990 Pro 4TB, but today it’s just $269 at Amazon. That’s a strong 6.5 cents per GB. Sure, there are slightly cheaper 4TB drives out there, but they don’t dominate our benchmark tests.

If you take a closer look at its specs, you see that the Samsung 990 Pro also provides TCG/Opal 2.0 encryption. And it uses an LPDDR4 DRAM cache to back up its 236-layer V-NAND TLC memory.

The 990 Pro not only has great specs, but great performance on our benchmarks. For example, it had the highest score of its competitors on the 3DMark Storage bandwidth test.

Great performance, great brand and great price. This is a tough deal to beat.

8TB of Speedy SSD at an Epic Low Price

For most people, even a 4TB SSD seems luxurious. But, if you need more storage and you don’t want (or aren’t able to) combined multiple drives in the same system, an 8TB drive is ideal. There aren’t many 8TB drives on the market, but WD Black’s SN850X is available in this spacious capacity and its now on sale for just $549 at Amazon, reduced from $694.

The SN850X 8TB is a PCIe Gen 4 drive that’s rated for 7,200 MB/s sequential reads, 6,600 MB/s and 1.2 million IOPS for read and write. It has a five year warranty and write endurance of 4,800 TBW (terabytes written).

The WD Black SN850X is also the fastest 8TB drive we’ve tested, easily outpacing competitors on both latency and bandwidth tests.

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In short, this is a high-performing, high-capacity drive at an epic low price.