Gamers on console, PC, and handheld all share some similar woes—mainly, seeing you’ve run out of system storage and can’t install the next game you want to play. It’s been impressive to see over the years how much more storage space can be packed into tiny little cards. However, games have only gotten bigger in size, so it doesn’t feel like a measurable improvements. The amount of titles you could install on a console 15 years ago is about the same or maybe even more than you can for today’s modern titles on a modern system. You can look at something like this year’s Forza Horizon 6. That game contains so many high-resolution assets that its total download size on PC reaches nearly 160GB.
In order to steer clear of the constant ritual of deleting old games to make room for new ones, you can always consider upgrading with more storage. Western Digital has a wide range of high performance SSDs serving different devices. Anyone who games on a laptop or handheld PC console like the Steam Deck can take a look at the WD_Black SN7100 gaming SSD. Amazon says its list price for the 1TB option is $375 and that it’s been marked down by 49% to $190.
Now, cards on the table, this is not the best time to be buying additional storage. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve seen across the board price increases for SSDs. This is in part due to increased investment from big tech companies into storage to support their AI ventures, leaving consumers with inflated prices that are two, three, or sometimes even four times higher than they were a year ago.
The 1TB WD_Black SN7100 SSD spent much of last year in the $70 to $80 range. So even though Amazon labels this as a big discount, it’s actually over $100 more expensive that it would have been for you in 2025.
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That said, if you can afford to shop for SSDs right now in this market, this is a great option for bumping up your Steam Deck or laptop storage.
This SSD’s PCIe Gen4 interface can handle keeping up with all the modern game releases. It supports high-speed reading and writing with an up to 7,250MB/s read speed and up to 6,900MB/s write speed. That’s about 35% faster that Western Digital’s previous model. It’s also substantially more efficient with its power use—100% better than the prior generation, actually.