It's great to see so many SSDs on sale on Prime Day. This is a great opportunity to upgrade your gaming rig to the latest technology, which is not only much faster than what you've been getting, but you can also get a bigger chunk, especially at this reduced price. And with 2TB SSDs as low as $235, it's a great time to upgrade.

If you are using a SATA-based SSD as your main boot drive or a rotating platter hard drive, the latest PCIe SSDs offer a significant performance boost. However, you must make sure that your motherboard has an M.2 slot and that you can boot from it. If not, you can upgrade your motherboard or purchase a high-capacity SATA drive, such as a 4TB Samsung 870 QVO.

A quick note: If you are looking at the WD_Black SN850 and Samsung 980 Pro, to get the most out of them you need to use a platform and CPU that supports Gen4 M.2. AMD Zen 2 or Zen 3 CPU and 500 series motherboard, you should be good to go. However, keep in mind that only Intel's latest Rocket Lake CPUs support PCIe 4.0. These drives will also work in PCIe 3.0 slots, but the interface limits them to 3,500 MB/sec (still fast enough).

Don't be intimidated by the idea of upgrading your boot drive. Most SSDs come with software, and copying an existing installation to a new SSD is as easy as a few mouse clicks. We previously described the process of cloning a typical drive.

The only thing to watch out for is to make sure the UEFI/BIOS is booting from the correct drive after the physical installation. Depending on the motherboard, you can generally select which drive to boot from by pressing F12 at boot time.

Alternatively, you can take this opportunity to install Windows from a new system. Throw out all the junk you've collected over the years and install it fresh. However, if you have a slow Internet connection or a lot of games (or apps) to download, this may be a bit of a hassle.

If you buy a high-capacity but not particularly fast drive, like the Crucial P2 2TB ($235.61), you'll need to make sure you have a spare M.2 slot available. Oh, and make sure your UEFI/BIOS is set to boot from the main OS drive.

Below is a list of SSDs that may be worth upgrading your system: