It’s typical to think of external SSDs as a place to store the things you don’t typically look at very often, like all those photos of your food you’ve taken. For goodness sake, just eat it. If a meal’s worth remembering, then your brain will cling to the memories of those flavours for all they’re worth. Anyway, external SSDs have other applications too. The right external drive can be a great place to store games, whether that’s big games that you’re not playing at the moment, or just as your standard install for smaller, lighter games. If that sounds useful to you, then you can currently get a discount on the best External SSD for gaming this Black Friday.

The Crucial X9 Pro is our pick for the best external SSD for gaming. It’s compact, it’s light, and it’s incredibly fast, boasting read speeds of 986MB/s, and write speeds of 899MB/s. It’s so good, in fact, that our hardware editor James recommends it over the technically more advanced Crucial X10 Pro. “It’s evidently a good alternative if you’ve got the money”, James says. “Although I’d still say the X9 Pro is more deserving of this spot on the list: despite being a fair bit cheaper than the X10 Pro, this almost matched the latter’s performances in the random 4K file benchmarks.”

UK Deals:

US Deals:

And that’s before we factor the current Black Friday discount. There are a couple of different deals worth your attention. In the UK, the 1TB capacity drive is available for £66 at Ebuyer, which is £5 lower than it’s been all week. You can also get the 2TB drive for £95, way down from its usual price of £150. As for US buyers, B&H Photo Video has the 1TB drive is down to $60 from $90, and the 2TB drive at $88 from $160. All of which are great deals. Of course, if you want to sniff around before you commit, you can always check our page on the best Black Friday SSD deals.

For all our top picks of the Black Friday sales, check out our guides to the best Black Friday PC gaming deals and the best Black Friday Steam Deck accessories deals. We’ll be updating these with all the best-value offers on quality hardware as we find them.