Early Black Friday deals cut £50 / $35 off one of the fastest gaming SSDs

One of my absolute favourite SSDs for gaming PCs is among the highlights of this year’s early Black Friday SSD deals. The WD Black SN850X is the overall second-fastest NVMe SSD in the RPS benchmark books – with the outright fastest write speeds – and its 1TB model has some sizeable savings going for it, across both the UK and US.

Here in the King’s lands, the 1TB SN850X dropping down to £88 puts it at its lowest price ever. And in the US, it would very nearly be the same story for $125, had Amazon not cut it to $120 for a single day back in September. Pfft, technicalities. Either way, these are excellent prices for a drive that sits high on our best SSD recommendations.

UK deal:

WD Black SN850X 1TB - £88 from Ebuyer (was £158)

US deal:

WD Black SN850X 1TB - $125 from B&H Photo Video (was $160)

Ebuyer, the teases, also have the Black SN850X’s 2TB model on a Black Friday deal for £158 – except it’s sold out. Can’t blame the folks who bought one, of course. The closest rival to this SSD, the Samsung 990 Pro, costs £160 for its 1TB version. Samsung’s drive is faster on read speeds, which are more useful to games, but double the capacity for £2 less? Impossible to turn down. Here’s hoping that 2TB model comes back in stock before Black Friday is over.

Obviously the 1TB version is a fine deal as well, and that’s more than enough capacity for a bunch of games, even with a Windows installation eating up gigabytes. Just be aware that the Black SN850X is a PCIe 4.0 SSD, so both your CPU and motherboard will need to support the 4.0 interface for it to work. That likely won't be a problem if they were made in the last few years: PCIe 4.0 support comes as standard on Intel chips going back to the 11th Gen range, and on AMD chips going back to the Ryzen 3000 series.