With Black Friday deals, SSDs get cheap enough for home storage

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Crucial MX300 SSD. PHOTO: Amazon online store

The online shopping craze in Singapore has been building up for a few years now over what’s traditionally a big American weekend to splurge on things.

Since Friday, you could have gone gaga over deals at local online sites like Lazada or have hung out at retailers such as Robinson’s, which are trying to lure shoppers back from clicking on things online.

And you can even buy a Jaguar car at a discount, going by a Cyber Monday deal that is set to run only for 24 hours.

Yet, the one thing that never fails to deliver are storage deals. In particular, solid state drives (SSDs) which have become cheaper each holiday season.

This year, you can actually buy one that’s large enough and cheap enough to simply store your holiday and baby photos. We’re talking about prices under US$250 (S$357) for a 1TB drive on Amazon this holiday season.

Crucial’s MX300 is going for US$239.99 for a 1TB version. That 2.5-inch drive should fit in any desktop PC easily. If you fancy Samsung, the Korean electronics maker has its 850 Evo on sale as well. It’s US$249.99 now for a 1TB version.

What if you got a laptop? Or want to connect straight to a desktop PC’s new M2 connector? Crucial’s MX300 comes in an M2 version as well, with a 1TB option going for US$249.99.

These are not the enthusiast-class, or super-fast NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) versions of SSDs, which go for more than US$600 for a 1TB version.

But chances are, you won’t see huge performance increases for regular desktop work. And for the simple task of storage, regular low-cost versions should do the job more than fine. They’d also be much faster than regular hard disks.

Indeed, with a 1TB SSD on your PC, you can handily install Windows and have spare space for many photos, songs and movies.

Or, if you already have an SSD drive that’s blazing fast, such relatively large-capacity versions can even be a purely storage drive. Dare I say use an SSD for a network attached storage (NAS) as well?

That used to be a luxury of companies running large data centres, but with prices falling so fast for SSDs, these new storage devices are now available in large capacities that are increasingly affordable for home users.

And despite the stronger US dollar against the Singapore dollar of late, the prices online appear attractive enough to ship over a nice SSD upgrade this holiday season.

Don’t forget: for orders under S$400, you also save on taxes when your SSD reaches Singapore.