We’ve tested a lot of hard drives of all sorts over the years from premium to budget options. So, we’re here to help you find the top cheap SSDs for your storage needs. You’ll find a lot of choices out there that don’t sacrifice performance in whichever budget range you’re looking for. Whether you’re searching for the latest PCIe M.2 SSD , an external SSD, or a SATA-compatible one, you’ll find something that will work for you here no matter what your storage needs are.
There was no such thing as the best cheap SSDs when solid state drives were first introduced. An SSD was expensive. These were premium upgrades to any computer system that got one. Thankfully, a lot has changed since then and finding reasonably priced solid state drives is relatively easy these days. And, they’re just as good as those pricier ones from years past.
While there are plenty of expensive solid state drives on the market as well, the top cheap SSDs can keep up when it comes to performance, though they might not offer the same amount of storage. Regardless, if you are on a budget and need more capacity, whether it’s to store creative projects, your overflow of games, or all your work documents, you’ll find the solution to your storage woes here.
Best M.2 SSD deal
Adata snipes the spot for best M.2 SSD deal, with a PCIe 3.0 x4 drive that offers high performance and storage for a price well below the competition. While many M.2 PCIe SSDs cost a fair bit more than their SATA counterparts, the SX7000 manages to keep its prices in league with SATA SSDs.
And, because it’s a PCIe drive, it can take advantage of the incredibly high bandwidth offered by this connection, giving you the most of its advertised 1,800MB/s sequential read and 850MB/s sequential write speeds. Top that off with fast random read and write times and a 5-year warranty to boot, and you’ve got a killer SSD that only gets better when you spot the price tag.
Best SATA SSD deal
No list of the best SSDs ever seems to be complete without the Samsung 850 Evo, which consistently ranks among head of the pack. While the 850 Evo is available as an M.2 and mSATA drive, it’s the standard 2.5-inch drive that proves time and time again to be an SSD you can’t go wrong with.
The 850 EVO comes in a number of different storage sizes, letting you choose what’s right for your budget. With fast read and write speeds, and reliable 3D NAND backed up by a 5-year warranty, the 850 Evo is a great drive from a respected brand. Though the price can fluctuate a bit, now’s a great time to pick one up – especially after the introduction of the Samsung 860 Evo.
Best budget SSD deal
The Crucial MX500 SSD offers incredible value, giving you plenty of storage per dollar. It comes in the standard 2.5-inch drive size, so it should fit in any standard desktop build, and will also fit in plenty of laptops.
On top of the MX500’s great value is its great performance. Despite the budget price, the MX500 is built using fast, high-endurance 3D NAND flash storage, and comes with a 5-year warranty to back it up. It’s speeds reading and writing data, both big and small, also keep up with the competition.
Best laptop SSD deal
Looking to upgrade your laptop? SanDisk has the answer. The SanDisk Ultra II offers great value and performance per dollar, and with the standard 2.5-inch drive size and only 7mm thickness, it should fit in a wide range of laptops.
The SanDisk Ultra II’s speeds keep up with its closest competitors, but at the 500GB sweet spot, it undercuts the price of other drives. This makes it a sweet pick for a laptop upgrade. It comes with a 3-year warranty.
Best external SSD deal
Western Digital has an external SSD that’s worth the price. While plenty of other external SSDs warrant serious consideration of building your own external SSD by just buying a normal SSD and a USB enclosure separately, the WD’s My Passport manages to offer a price that’s only slightly higher than an internal SSD of the same size. Plus you won’t find a third-party enclosure smaller than the WD My Passport SSD.
Supporting USB-C and USB 3.1 Gen 2, the My Passport external SSD is capable of fast communication with a PC. It’s also small and light, with dimensions of just 1.8 x 3.5 x 0.39 inches and a weight of 1.44 ounces. Of course, with portability comes the question of security, but the My Passport includes 256-bit encryption to keep your data safe from intruders, and it’s drop-tested up to 6.5 feet to keep your data safe from accidents.
The best cheap hard drive deals and prices for May 2022
With the rise in popularity of the best SSDs , many people have started to write hard drives off as a thing in the past. That’s a mistake – the best hard drives offer huge amounts of storage at prices that SSDs just can’t match. If you have a giant library of music, video or even photos, it’s a good idea to look at a traditional hard drive for all your archival needs.
Regardless of what you need the storage for, nobody wants to pay full price for what is essentially old technology, no matter how useful it is. As with any type of PC hardware, the MSRP is more of a guideline than any kind of firm rule.
Luckily, we here at TechRadar have combed through hundreds of deals across the internet to find best hard drive deals so you won’t miss the best sales this week.
Best hard drive deals
Seagate scores the spot for the best hard drive deal, with their BarraCuda drives that strike that perfect balance between storage, speed and price. The 3TB drives in this lineup are an especially great deal, as they really hit that sweet spot between high density storage and a sweet 7,200RPM spin rate. And they do this while maintaining a price that’s significantly lower than their direct competition.
So if you’re looking for a drive for light archiving, or a main drive and you don’t want to take the plunge on an SSD, the BarraCuda will be a great choice, as it can reach read speeds of up to 190 MB/s which is more than enough for day-to-day computing.
Best gaming hard drive deal
When it comes to gaming, the biggest priority is speed. Nobody wants to be playing their favorite PC games, only to encounter unbearable loading times. That’s where the WD VelociRaptor drives really shine. These slick drives offer a blistering 10,000 RPM, so that you’ll spend as little time as possible loading, and more time actually playing.
Better yet, they offer much better price-per-gigabyte than even budget SSDs, so if you’re looking to cut down on your downtime, you can do so while still saving a couple bucks.
Best hybrid hard drive deal
Hybrid drives combine the best aspects of both SSDs (solid state drives) and hard drives, and allow you have high storage density while also having the speed of an SSD for the data you use the most. The Seagate FireCuda desktop drives take this formula and perfect it by including 2TB of data with 8GB of smart flash memory. That might seem like a small complement of SSD space, but it learns and store which files and applications you use the most, helping you access it faster than a standard HDD.
And now, with the rising ubiquity of SSDs, there’s never been a better time to find a deal on the FireCuda – as along with other SSHDs, the prices are being cut constantly.
Best laptop hard drive deal
These days, it’s becoming more and more common for laptops to be built with SSDs. While this is great if you’re not necessarily looking for high amounts of storage, anyone who needs a lot of space to work is going to be stuck paying an extremely high premium. Luckily, the HGST Travelstar solves this issue by offering 1TB of storage with a 7,200 RPM spin rate at a very modest price.
Coming in 750GB and 1TB varieties, the Travelstar is a great deal for anyone who is looking for a great hard drive in their laptop.
Best external hard drive deal
Do you travel for work or school a lot? Well, if so, the WD Elements line of external drives might just be perfect for you. Not only do these drives offer a great price-per-gigabyte level, but they’re small enough to carry along with you without breaking a sweat.
Not only does the WD Elements line offer high storage and high portability, but they also undercut the price of the competition, making it a great purchase for anyone who needs to carry their work with them.
Windows 11 doesn’t deserve the hate – but Microsoft needs to do more
A new report by AdDuplex reveals that Windows 11 is now installed on 19.3% of computers, suggesting that Microsoft is struggling to convince people to upgrade to its new operating system.
While that number may seem initially impressive – after all, nearly 20% of all PCs is still a large number – it’s only a small increase of the 16.1% share AdDuplex reported the month earlier.
Building momentum is incredibly important this early on in an operating system’s life, so the fact that upgrades are slowing down a few months after launch is going to be concerning for Microsoft. Meanwhile, Windows 10 21H1 is the most-used version of Windows with 27.5% share, a small drop from the previous month.
Interestingly, Windows 10 21H2, which was released around the same time as Windows 11, has 21% market share. It seems that many Windows 10 users are upgrading to the newer version of Windows 10, rather than switching to Windows 11.
That makes sense – many people would rather stick with what they know. It also highlights that Microsoft may not be making as convincing an argument for switching to Windows 11 as it needs to.
The fact that older version of Windows 10, including Windows 10 20H2 on 17.9% and Windows 10 2004 on 7.9%, make up the bulk of the rest of the market, highlights the struggle Windows 11 faces.
The data AdDuplex uses is from around 5,000 apps that use the AdDuplex v2 SDK on the Microsoft Store, and covers around 60,000 PCs. This means the survey only includes versions of Windows that come with the Microsoft Store (Windows 10 and Windows 11), so while this doesn’t give us a complete view of the operating system market, it does help us understand the popularity of Windows 10 and Windows 11.
Analysis: Why the Windows 11 hate?
Since its launch, there seems to be quite a bit of negativity surrounding Windows 11, and this may be why Windows 10 users are hesitant to switch. When Microsoft announced Windows 11, many people were surprised. Not because of past comments by Microsoft that suggested that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows released, but because Windows 10 still feels relatively modern. With the release of Windows 10 21H2 , it’s also an operating system that continues to get new updates and features.
For people using Windows 10 who are happy with the operating system, there doesn’t seem like a huge reason to switch to Windows 11. Windows 10 isn’t perfect, but that too might actually convince people to stick with the older OS.
Microsoft had a rough patch where it released numerous Windows 10 updates that appeared to cause more problems than they fixed. This affected people’s confidence in Microsoft, and some may think if the company can’t get an operating system update right, what kind of problems would an entirely new operating system bring?
Holding off from installing a new operating system as soon as it launches and sticking with your existing OS until early bugs and problems are fixed, is actually a pretty good idea. Once Microsoft corrects the Windows 11 problems (thankfully there aren’t too many) and addresses some of the complaints users have, we may see more Windows 10 users switch to Windows 11.
Another valid reason why people may not upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 10 is the fact that they simply can’t. Microsoft made having TPM a requirement for Windows 11, and this has meant that many perfectly capable PCs can’t actually officially run the new operating system. We can’t see Microsoft changing its position on this (in fact, it’s made life harder for people running Windows 11 on unsupported hardware), so many people won’t upgrade to Windows 11 until they get new devices, and that could be years from now.
Unfortunately, there is a growing negativity about Windows 11 as well. Many of its detractors are very vocal online, which could make people wary of upgrading. Some of these grumbles are definitely valid, but I increasingly feel like some of the hate is undeserved.
Sure, Windows 11 has some frustrating quirks at the moment – the reduced functionality of the taskbar is particularly baffling – but Microsoft is continuing to add features and fix issues. The new user interface may take some getting used to, but it feels fresh and modern.
I’ve also found Windows 11 to run well, with boot times particularly improved. While I don’t love the operating system (Microsoft still struggles to make anyone feel particularly fond of its software), I don’t hate it either.
Microsoft needs to counter the negative opinion people are forming of Windows 11 as quickly as possible, and show people why they gain from upgrading to the new operating system. What it certainly doesn’t want to happen is for Windows 11 to be spoken about in the same way people talk about Windows Vista or Windows 8 .
Those two versions are widely derided as embarrassing failures – a fate that Windows 11 doesn’t deserve.
Via Xda Developers
