Between all the games you’ve bought during the Steam Winter Sale and their ever-increasing file sizes, it’s safe to say you can never have too much storage. While SSD prices are still higher than they ought to be across the board, Western Digital has taken the chance to slash the cost of its drives, making WD Blue SN5000 cheaper than it’s ever been.
With discounts taking up to 31% off on Amazon, you can currently get the 1TB model for $60 in the US, £70 in the UK, and as low as €71 across Europe. I’ve never seen it lower in all the regions I’ve checked. You can see your local deals by clicking the button below.
WD Blue SN5000 (1TB)
Designed for creators and professionals but with budget in mind, you can use this drive to store games, files, or fuel your AI-enabled applications.
While Gen 5 has raised the speed ceiling for the best SSDs, this PCIe 4.0 model does a fantastic job of bridging the gap with 5,150MB/s sequential read and 4,900MB/s sequential write performance. Any more and you’ll pay for the pleasure, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a similarly swift drive that’s this affordable.
Specs round out with 730K IOPS (Input/output operations per second), priming it for any task you have in mind. WD specifically angles SN5000 as its budget proposition for AI workloads and switching tasks, making it a dab hand at anything you throw at it. A 600TBW (terabytes written) endurance means it’ll last and there’s a limited five-year warranty in the rare instance something goes awry.
As a 2280 NVMe, it’ll fit in any spare M.2 slot you have. It can withstand operating temperatures of up to 85°C in the rare event it works up a sweat, so you’ll be fine leaving it bare in a well-ventilated case, but it’s best positioned underneath a motherboard heat shield if you have one.
If you fancy something a bit quicker with more space, then it’s worth turning your attention to the 2TB WD BLACK 2TB SN7100. Sporting an exclusive 19% discount in the US, it offers speeds up to 7,250MB/s for just $130. Considering it’s double the storage, it packs even more value for North American residents, but much like its Blue brethren, it’s a limited-time deal that won’t sit on digital shelves for long.
WD BLACK SN7100 (2TB)
Get ready to game even faster with the WD BLACK SN7100 NVMe SSD, featuring up to 35% faster performance than the previous generastion.
Both models are returnable until January 31, giving you a month to decide whether or not it ticks all the right boxes. In the meantime, follow us on Google News to keep tabs on the latest tech deals we find.
