As we approach the end of the year, my desktop is looking downright cluttered—and no, I'm not just gesturing despairingly at my messy desk. 2025 has seen the release of some absolute bangers, from my beloved Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to many, many titles still languishing in my Steam library. How on earth am I gonna find the disk space for all of these game of the year contenders—let alone tear myself away from yet another run at the Paintress? The Amazon Big Deal Days offers some solutions.
Crucial has its eye on the prize during these Amazon Big Deal [[link]] Days, with a number of its already budget-friendly SSDs enjoying even steeper price slices. For starters, the Crucial P510 is our top pick for the best budget PCIe 5.0 in our best SSD for gaming guide, and is now offering 1TB for only $80. However, I'm here to offer a little commotion for the PCIe 4.0, overshadowed sister SSD, the Crucial P310 (2280)—especially as you can get the 1TB version for only $63 at Newegg. Talk about upstaging your siblings.
While the 2230 version of this drive is okay to pop in your Steam Deck, the Crucial P310 really comes into its own as a 2280 M.2 form factor SSD. This larger, longer form factor essentially offers a greater surface area for what was a toasty drive to dissipate heat. It's also worth noting that you can get the 4TB version of the Crucial P310 (2280) with a heat sink thrown in for $252 at Amazon. That's not the best deal on a 4TB SSD I've seen, but the added heatsink will definitely appeal to some.
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As a PCIe 4.0 drive, it's not as speedy as some of Crucial's aforementioned, downright affordable 5.0 options but that doesn't mean it's crawling along either. When Zak put this drive to the test in his Crucial P310 1 TB (2280) review, he rated its strong sequential performance and low temps.
As this is a [[link]] DRAM-less drive, you are having to compromise on write speeds for that compelling price. However, while the advertised 6,000 MB/s write speed doesn't match the SSD's faster 7,100 MB/s read speed, I'd say that gap is far from a deal breaker; sure, it might take a bit longer to get your games onto the drive, but once they're there you shouldn't be left waiting around during load screens.
If you're after a more technical explanation or simply wondering how this SSD might perform under different workloads, Zak explains it really well. He writes, "[This drive's] QLC just isn't built with professional workloads in mind. Not only does it lack that endurance, but in my experience, without a suitably sized cache, large file transfers tend to lose speed over time once the cache is filled or the drive heats up. The P310 does have QLC dedicated to caching, but it's not anywhere near as effective as a pure dedicated DDR4 DRAM solution. Still, even during game downloads and installs, the likelihood is you're never going to hit that bottleneck anyway, so it's a fairly moot point, as long as it's picked up with that use case in mind."
Long story short, it was always gonna take me a while to work through my Steam backlog, DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 SSD or no. But an offering of 1TB for well under $70 is one I can't really refuse.
Check out Amazon's full list of Prime Day SSD deals
1. Best overall:
WD_Black SN7100
2. Best budget:
Biwin Black Opal NV7400
3. Best PCIe 5.0:
WD_Black SN8100
4. Best budget PCIe 5.0:
Crucial P510
5. Best 4 TB:
TeamGroup MP44
6. Best 8 TB:
WD_Black SN850X
7. Best M.2 2230:
Lexar Play 2230
8. Best for PS5:
Silicon Power XS70
9. Best SATA:
Crucial MX500