The Samsung 990 Pro SSD is on sale for the lowest price you’re likely to see this year.

Hard drives, RAM, SD card prices have risen dramatically over the past six months as memory-hungry AI data centers consume more silicon chips in pursuit of a viable business model. As with most rug pulls, consumers like you and me are left holding the bag (in more ways than one), which has so far meant the price of memory.

It’s Prime Day, and there are some deals that are bringing prices back to a semblance of reality. The best I’ve seen is on Samsung 2-TB 990 Evo Plus SSD, which costs $370. Is this a great deal? Well, yes and no. Abstractly, no, it’s not. A year ago this was the drive Selling for $140. Six months ago it was still only $300.

But we live in the real world, and in the real world, this campaign has spent the last two months hovering at over $600, so getting close to $300 of that makes this the deal it is. Since there is no sign of the AI ​​bubble stopping, I fully expect this to be the lowest price you will see for the rest of the year.

Samsung 990 Pro SSD is our product Our top bare hard drive pick in our guide to SSDs. The NVMe M.2 PCIe drive achieved read speeds of 7458MB/s in my testing, which is roughly consistent with read/write speeds of 7450MB/6900MB/s. This speed makes this drive ideal for intensive tasks, such as video editing or gaming. Just promise me you won’t run local AI on it. Please don’t encourage them

The deal I linked here is the 2TB version, but there it is The 4TB version is available for $885 And a The 1TB version sells for $220. There are faster drives on the market, but I find that beyond the speed of that drive, there is a diminishing return in the speed versus price curve, especially these days. I’ve been using this drive as my main drive for several months now and it works great for editing 5.2K GoPro video footage and compiling software. My favorite part? They generate very little heat.

Photo: Scott Gilbertson

XR

64GB Professional SDXC Memory Card