We live in an uncertain world when it comes to SSD storage. Severe market pressures, fuelled by the rapid growth in AI, have caused NAND flash prices to skyrocket. When reasonably priced stock appears, it quickly sells out. It doesn't matter if you're looking for a PCIe 4 or 5 SSD for your PC or laptop, either as your boot drive or as a second drive for additional storage, because the prices aren't playing ball.
These rapid price changes for SSDs leave buyers in a quandary. You can't turn back time to last year's prices, so if you need a new SSD, you'll need to be savvy with where you look and how much you spend.
Our list of the best SSDs is still the first place to start if you're unsure what type of drive to buy for your setup. If you know the capacity and model you're looking for, we've put together a comprehensive list of leading 4TB, 2TB, and 1TB SSDs at their lowest available prices in the United States.
We'll be updating this list every day for the foreseeable future. Given how many hundreds, if not thousands, of different SSDs there are out there, we're focusing on just some of the major makes and models here, and only on NVMe drives, not older SATA alternatives. We break the drives down into several categories based on capacity and interface speeds to help you find the best one for your budget.
If you're looking for other component upgrades, you can find further savings in our lists for SSD deals , GPU deals , CPU deals , gaming laptop deals , monitor deals , 3D printer deals , and PC hardware deals .
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PCIe Gen 5 SSDs are the latest in SSD tech, offering the most bandwidth and fastest sequential speeds, as long as your PC or laptop supports it. You can find SSDs with sequential reads and writes of up to 14,800 MB/s, almost double what you'll manage with a top-class Gen 4 alternative. These are the best of the best, so unfortunately, demand for their use with AI is exceptionally high at the moment. Expect to pay top dollar for the privilege of owning one, but if you do, you'll get the fastest speeds possible to date.
Unlike the other categories, we're grouping all of the PCIe 5 drive capacities together.
You'll find all of our recommended PCIe 4 and 3 drives in 4TB capacity below. This is typically a category with high prices to consider, but if your budget can stretch this far, this is a great option for a one-and-done drive. 4TB is going to leave you plenty of space for a big collection of game installations, along with videos, the odd virtual machine, and even an AI model or two.
2TB has often been the sweet spot for gamers, offering a little extra over 1TB, but without the much larger price demands of a 4TB model. You'll see our recommendations for 2TB drives, along with up-to-date pricing, below. Drives like the Western Digital SN850X and Samsung 990 Pro continue to be the best models to choose from, but these high-demand items are priced at a premium.
You can still pick up lower capacity drives, but 1TB is the minimum capacity we'd recommend, even with higher prices. Given how much space an operating system like Windows 11 can take, not to mention the huge capacity requirements for AAA games, media editing, or local LLM work for AI, you're going to need a 1TB SSD for your boot drive if you don't want to immediately run out of space.
There's also the option, if your device has a spare NVMe slot, to install a second drive for extra storage. This can be a good way to free up space on your boot drive for your OS and important applications. While the price increases will make this a harder choice for some, if you need the space, you'll want to pick up a drive that can handle it. Our recommendations below cover 1TB SSDs at PCIe 3 and 4 speeds.
These drives are featured at the lowest prices we can find in the U.S. for these major SSD makes and models. While you might be able to find no-brand drives at a lower cost, this isn't something we'd recommend, as these come untested and with a higher likelihood of failure, with irretrievable data loss as the end result.
AI isn't just affecting SSDs, so make sure to check out our GPU price index for twice-daily updates on where to find the best prices for a new graphics card, too.
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Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/ssd-price-tracking-2026-lowest-price-on-every-m-2-ssd#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.