Now is a great time to buy a hard drive. We've been covering external hard drive deals on Creative Bloq for years, and we're pretty good at catching the very best deals over Amazon Prime Day (if we do say so ourselves). But those two days in mid-July are only half the story, and we've often seen the best deals on hard drives fall on either side of the official event dates (that's 11-12 July this year).
For example, before Prime Day even begun we'd already found a couple of Prime Day hard drive deals that beat 2022's Prime Day prices (see below). And these are deals on the best hard drives, not any old second rate storage. But what's the ideal hard drive for you, and how much do you need to spend?
First off, I can tell you what you won't be wanting to get this Prime Day. The SanDisk Extreme SSD, and Extreme SSD Pro were recently identified by users to be faulty, and in some cases randomly wiping users' data completely. And though SanDisk has released a firmware update for the 4TB version, we think it prudent not to cover any deals on the model this Prime Day.
Remember, most of the best Prime SSD deals won't need you to have a Prime membership, but a few will, so think about getting the 30-day free Amazon Prime trial to make the most of those.
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Prime Day SSD deals: US
Prime Day SSD deals: UK
Prime Day hard drive deals: US
Prime Day hard drive deals: UK
How do I know if it's a good Prime Day SSD deal?
We've been covering Prime Day SSD deals for a number of years now, and we only ever report on genuine savings on trusted drives. But we don't want you to just take our word for it. There are free tools that can help you make sure that you really are making the best buying decision when you see a deal that looks good to you (many of which we use).
Top of our list are easy tools that will allow you to see the price history of the product that you're thinking of buying. Google Shopping is good if you want to compare information of products, and the big one for Amazon (which we use all the time), is CamelCamelCamel. You can use the site, or get a browser extension, which will make checking the price an easy one click exercise.
What's the difference between SSD and HHD?
There are two types of external hard drive: hard disk drives (HDDs, also known as mechanical or traditional hard drives) and solid state drives (SSDs). All SSDs are faster, lighter and less power-hungry than HDD drives, which will be cheaper but also slower. HDDs are also good for storing lots of data as they often have a high capacity.
If you want to store huge amounts of data while keeping prices low, a HDD is the way to go – such as the ever-popular WD My Passport. But if speed is your top priority, then choose an SSD. Or, you can always use a smaller SSD for files that you need to access or move around often, and then store the other data that you use less often on a higher capacity HDD.
