Our favorite 8 TB NVMe SSD is now cheaper than picking up two 4 TB drives, at only ¢7 per gigabyte

After happily bouncing between side content for perhaps one too many hours, I finally finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Don't worry, I'm not going to spoil any of this RPG's twists and turns. However, when all was said and done in this beautifully fractured, Belle Epoque world, I turned around to discover I had taken well over 5,000 screenshots. That is, in a word, excessive—and left me rather concerned for whatever space was left on my internal SSD.

Whether you're a screenshot fiend like me, giving the F12 key absolutely no quarter, or simply like to hop between lots of games with chunky sizes, you'll know space often comes at a . If you're looking for a beefy SSD, you're going to be putting a considerable chunk of change down no matter what—but it just so happens my absolute favourite NVMe SSD, the WD_BLACK SN850X, is currently only $590 for 8 TB of space at Amazon.

Bundled with a heatsink, and normally closer to costing a grand besides, that's a cracking deal for that amount of space. Besides that, our Zak really rated it in his WD Black SN850X 8 TB NVMe SSD review. Though he gave it a score of 83% overall, he did have some reservations, namely that picking up two of Western Digital's 4 TB drives was more economical. Well, if you're picking up two of those 4 TB bad boys from Amazon at least (with the heatsinks included), you're looking at parting with about $640.

That means that right now, going for the single 8 TB stick is the more cost-effective option, at around 50 bucks less. That said, Zak quite rightly cautions against putting all of your files on one drive and one drive only.

He writes, "If you're solely storing all of your games, media, or important documentation on a single 8 TB drive, without a suitable backup solution, and it all goes wrong, or your home gets struck by lightning and fries everything, that's a critical error that could cost you far more than the value of the drive itself."

Though Western Digital (now under the SanDisk umbrella) has earned a reputation for sturdy SSDs, and a five-year warranty from the manufacturer also offers peace of mind, data loss disasters can happen to anyone. That's one more reason going with two 4 TB drives may be the safer bet; if one fails, you're losing less, and it will likely be less of a faff to replace too.

But if you have a healthy backup drive ecosystem already burbling away in the background, and an appetite for games with particularly massive sizes, the 8 TB option may be just what you're looking for.

As for me, even though I'm not out here chopping it up in Elden Ring: Nightreign (a comparatively svelte 30 GB), RPGs that are more in my wheelhouse can still take up a good chunk of SSD space. At a little over 40 GB, my beloved Clair Obscur is currently the biggest thing on my drive—you know, minus all the screenshots.

As you likely noticed, best SSD for gaming guide at least ensures I'll have the room to dream.