Black Friday deal spotlight: Speed up your storage with the Samsung 980 Pro 1TB SSD

Chums, I have a confession to make. For someone writing about Black Friday PC hardware deals, I don’t know all that much about PC hardware. Oh, I’ve been building my own PCs for 20-odd years, I just sort of ran out of storage in my brain around 2011 and now I have to spend ages reading up on the latest developments every time I need to buy a new component. If only I could just slot one of these Samsung 980 Pro SSDs into my brain, I would no longer have that problem.

Thankfully, I pick stuff up quickly and I’m learning lots of new things about PC hardware. Did you know that you can get hard disks in the form of little sticks these days? Marvellous! The Samsung 980 Pro is a particularly swift SSD because it uses the newer PCIe 4.0 interface, putting its read/write speeds way beyond the most common, garden variety PCIe 3.0 drives. As you’d probably expect, that speed boost comes at a premium, which is why the deep discount being offered on the 1TB version of the 980 Pro is especially tantalising.

RPS’ former-tech-expert-(texpert)-now-guv’nor Katharine reviewed this speedy sliver of storage a little over a year ago and described it as “barnstorming.” Twice! I can't blame her, it's a brilliant word. The only thing that she mentioned leaving her barns unstormed was the price, but with this deal, that’s no longer an issue. That said, you'll also need a CPU and motherboard that can enable PCIe 4.0's top speeds - a Ryzen 5000 series, Intel 11th Gen or Intel 12th Gen processor will do the trick on the CPU side.

Maybe this isn't the SSD for you? Fancy something SATA (or PCIe 3.0) instead? We've got you covered at our Black Friday SSD deals page! For all your other PC hardware needs, you can slide over to our main Black Friday deals hub instead.