For anyone in need of extra storage and who doesn't mind getting a song stuck in their head all day, here's a chance to save a few bucks on what is already an aggressively priced solid state drive, the WD Blue 2TB. It's listed for $169.99 on eBay, with coupon code IMBLUEDABADEE knocking $5 off at checkout.
If you don't get the reference, then definitely don't click this link—it's one of those tunes that isn't easily scrubbed from the brain. You clicked, didn't you? Hey, you were warned, a courtesy that wasn't extended when Rickrolling was at its height of popularity.
Western Digital lists this drive at $189.99 at its webstore, down from $239.99. The discounted price is closer to what it actually goes for these days. So this deal doesn't represent a ginormous discount, but it is a great price for 2TB of SSD storage, from a name-brand manufacturer, no less.
The caveat is that it's a SATA-based SSD in the 2.5-inch form factor. You're not going to get the same speed as an NVMe drive, especially newer PCIe 4.0 models that push reads into 7,000MB/s territory, or the convenience of the M.2 form factor. But you do get a lot of storage for the money.
It's similar in specs to Crucial's MX500, which adorns our list of the best SSDs for gaming, as a secondary drive. Western Digital rates the sequential read and write speeds at 560MB/s and 530MB/s, respectively. Those are close to the upper limits of SATA-based SSDs.
While not on par with NVMe SSDs, SATA-based models will still make your system feel faster and respond much quicker than a hard drive, if you're still using one of those as your primary storage. Even for gaming, NVMe doesn't bring much of a tangible performance boost over SATA just yet, though that could change when developers begin taking advantage of Microsoft's DirectStorage API.
You'll have to decide for yourself if going the SATA route makes sense. If the answer is yes, this is one of the best values around for an SSD that straddles the line as bulk storage.
