If you want to buy either a solid-state hard drive for your PC; a microSD card for your camera, phone, or other portable device; or just a really good USB thumb drive, Amazon is offering some very decent discounts on SanDisk storage products today.
Usually, when it comes to buying consumer electronics, there’s that annoying stage of trying to compare and contrast multiple brands. Is a Vizio TV better than a Sharp TV? Does it matter which brand of RAM I buy? And why?
One place where that really isn’t an issue is solid-state memory, where SanDisk pretty much rules the market in reliability. (You could have made an argument that Western Digital could give SanDisk a run for its money, but then, uh, Western Digital bought it, so it’s all kind of a moot point.)
Take, for instance, what I’m about to buy for myself, this SanDisk Ultra II 1 TB SATA drive for my home PC. Earlier this month, it was $320; today, you can grab it for $250. I’ve been limping along on a 128 GB SSD on my home-gaming PC, and it’s become a pain — as game sizes swell, I really can only fit one or two titles on the drive before having to copy them to a slower, old-school hard-disk drive, which is annoying, and also makes for longer load times.
Now, it should be said that the Ultra II is no longer the ne plus ultra of SSDs — the SanDisk Extreme Pro series, which hit the market last fall, is faster than the Ultra II. But Extreme Pros also cost a lot more, and (especially if you’re upgrading from a traditional HDD) the Ultra II should do you just fine.
There’s also some great deals on microSD cards (vital for photographers, and useful if you want to, say, add a bunch of memory to your Nintendo Switch), as well as some solid deals on USB drives. Much like the Ultra II above, all of them are about one generation behind the current top-of-the-line offerings, but unless you spend your time running endless speed tests, you’re unlikely to notice a difference. I’d also recommend using a site like CamelCamelCamel, and just checking to make sure you’re getting a good deal — some of the discounts are a lot deeper than others.
Memory has already gotten stupidly cheap over the past five years. But the fact that you can buy a 1 TB solid-state drive for under $300, or a 256 microSD card for $120 today, is unreal. If you find yourself running out of room on your devices, today’s the day to fix that.
New York Magazine gets a small commission if you buy anything from Amazon through our links. That said, we don’t recommend stuff we wouldn’t actually buy for ourselves — or, in my case, have just placed an order for while typing this article.
