I'm going to be so real with you right now: in a lot of cases, you don't strictly need an SSD. If you've got lots of photos, and videos, or even films and TV shows stored on a media server—you tech wizard, you—you don't necessarily need the speed of a SSD. HDDs are comparatively slower with arguably more things that can go wrong, but if you don't [[link]] need your files at speed, they're a perfectly acceptable and darn sight more affordable storage solution.
For games, though, it's a different story—the internal drive on my gaming PC is definitely not a HDD. Running your games from an SSD makes a lot more sense for the breezy load times alone, and as such I've tracked down not one but two solid state drive deals that anyone looking [[link]] to upgrade should consider. First up, you can get a 4 TB Samsung 990 Evo Plus for only $250 from Newegg. If that doesn't impress you much, then for 10 bucks less from Amazon you can pick up the 4 TB version of the Team Group MP44 SSD.
Quick links
- Team Group MP44 4 TB SSD | $240 at Amazon (save $60)
- Samsung 990 Evo Plus 4 TB SSD | $250 at Newegg (save $78)
4 TB SSD deals
Now, to be clear the Team Group MP44 remains our top pick for the best 4 TB SSD, though Nick flags a major caveat in his review. This Team Group MP44 can get pretty toasty, so if you don't have an M.2 heatsink ready to go for this SSD, then you're going to be in trouble.
But for an asking price well below $300, you're still getting a swish SSD with not just an impressive 4 TB capacity but that is also also decently speedy. Nick writes in his review, "An average write speed of around 5,900 MB/s is maintained for around 196 seconds before dropping to 2,650 MB/S—which points to a maximum cache size of a little over 1 TB, and unless you're trying to write lots of huge 4K video files to the drive all the time, the MP44 will sustain that 5,900 figure comfortably."
Still, if keeping things cool is a concern, you can spend $10 more on the Samsung 990 Evo Plus. Yes, as far as our best SSD for gaming guide is concerned, it only gets an 'also tested' mention. That doesn't mean it's a bad drive at all, it just means it's up against some very swift competition.
In his Samsung 990 Evo Plus review, Zak praised the SSD's strong sequential performance and, importantly, highlighted the drives ability to stay as cool as a cucumber under load. He writes, "As for temps, perhaps unsurprisingly for a single-sided 1 TB M.2 2280 SSD with brand spanking new, power-efficient NAND, the Samsung 990 EVO Plus did remarkably well. It managed a svelte 59.0 C at its peak. That's cool enough to comfortably sling it into any device you can think of without worry."
One of the drive's major drawbacks when Zak reviewed it was its price—but at only $250 for 4 TB of space, it's definitely worth another look. Still, with sufficient cooling, the Team Group MP44 for only $240 is also a very compelling contender. If that's still a little much for your budget though, don't forget to check out our guide to all the best cheap SSD deals for gaming today.