For this capacity at this price point, this drive is worth considering. If only because it’s pretty fast, pretty reliable, and pretty good value—at a time when all of those things are tough to find together.
Key specs: NVMe | PCIe 4.0 | 7,400 MB/s read | 6,500 MB/s writeView Deal
Let’s not pretend that SSDs are in a good place right now. It’s tough going out there and prices are much higher now than they have been for half a decade. That said, we can’t go without in a modern gaming PC—many games demand solid state storage—so if you’re stuck in a bind, here’s the best SSD deal I could find this Prime Day.
It’s this Acer Predator GM7 for $246 at Amazon. It’s a 2 TB drive, as the higher capacity generally makes for better value, coming in at $0.12/GB.
I’ve run the numbers on all the NVMe SSDs in our Prime Day SSD deals page and they range anywhere from $0.10/GB to $0.18/GB—the former being this admittedly quite slow 4 TB drive that’s near enough $400; and the latter being our previous pick for the best SSD for gaming, the SN850X.
The only other drive that gets close to the GM7 and doesn’t cost $400 or more is the Crucial P310, which is a touch slower but a known, now defunct, brand (Crucial was a subdivision of Micron until the memory crisis). So that’s also a valid pick if the GM7 is kaput. Though it’s coming from Amazon Germany and while we don’t think it will incur any extra costs than what’s noted, there’s always a chance of some extra import fees or delays that kill the whole value proposition. It’s available at Newegg with a code (FTTF6425) for $275 as a more reliable backup, in my opinion.
This drive uses QLC memory and comes without DRAM cache, but it’s still an impressively quick drive for the money, with strong sequential performance.
Key specs: PCIe 4.0 | Up to 7,100 MB/s read | up to 6,000 MB/s write
Price check: Newegg $274.99View Deal
We’re curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here
The GM7 doesn’t suck, at least, as it’s rated to 7,400 MB/s sequential read, which is right up there for the best the PCIe 4.0 specification can deliver. Beyond that, you’ll need a PCIe 5.0 drive, and those have truly lost the plot when it comes to pricing. The SN8100 is $386 for a 2 TB model, upwards of $0.19/GB. Yeesh.
I think we’ll stick to PCIe 4.0 for now, as it’s plenty fast enough for gaming. The sequential write speed is rated to 6,500 MB/s, which is a little slower than some but nothing to fret about. Importantly, the drive has a 5-year/1200 TBW warranty, which is pretty good.
Acer’s drives are actually put together by Biwin, who is also the seller of this very drive on Amazon. Biwin is said to be using a Maxiotek controller and YMTC TLC NAND for this drive, which would be a close fit for the Biwin Black Opal NV7400 that our Zak reviewed last year. The speeds are identical, which bodes well, but we know that exact DRAMless controller is pretty capable and doesn’t get very hot under load.
In a tough climate, I’ll take the win here. While far from a perfect drive, or the cheapest historically, it’s good value in comparison to many others on the market today.
👉Check out Amazon’s NVMe deals👈
