I thought Black Friday was the day when SSDs would be at their lowest possible price. Thankfully, I was wrong. This 1TB WD Black SN770 SSD is the cheapest I've ever seen it on sale: $60 on Amazon (opens in a new tab).

If it sells out (and it really might), it's only another dollar more at Best Buy (open in new tab).

In our review of the WD Black SN770 last year (opens in new tab), we said of this SSD, "It's not the fastest drive, nor the cheapest drive (although it's close), but it's the most expensive.

This is still true about the performance of this drive. It ignores the fact that there are PCIe 4.0 drives that are much faster than this, and that PCIe 5.0 drives are on the horizon. But no other drive is as inexpensive and cost-effective as the SN770. [The drive's rated speeds of 5,150 MB/s read and 4,900 MB/s write are more reminiscent of first-generation PCIe 4.0 drives than the racy second-generation drives. For raw speed, we recommend an SSD like the WD Black SN850X. This is also offered for $100 (opens in new tab) and is well worth the investment.

However, this is a fairly inexpensive drive for a DRAM-less structure. This drive reduces manufacturing costs by omitting some of the normally useful high-speed silicon and instead relies on a convenient SanDisk controller to get around this limitation. Surprisingly, this drive works very well and is now catching up to more expensive drives at a much cheaper price.

The only thing worth noting is that this drive can get a little hot. This is easy to do since most M.2 slots have heatsinks or are in the firing line of the fan in a standard mid-tower, but one should be careful when sticking it elsewhere.