This story is part of Holiday Gift Guide 2021, our list of ideas, by topic, by recipient and by price, to help you discover the perfect gift.
Every year you can find great Black Friday deals on storage for your game consoles and computers and 2021 is no different. It really is the best time of year to get more gigabytes to hold your files, music, movies, photos and games. This batch is the best deals we’ve found tucked into the Black Friday ads from Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg and more.
Samsung
Your old microSD card might not be up to the task of recording high-speed, high-resolution video. I found out the hard way mine wasn’t when I was on a trip and my camera simply couldn’t save videos to my card because it was too slow. This Samsung Pro Plus card is what I switched to and with its write speed of up to 120MB per second, it had no trouble recording 4K video at 120 frames per second or 5.3K video from the GoPro Hero 10 Black. The 128GB and 512GB capacities are on sale right now, too, as well as other Samsung microSD cards for less demanding uses.
Wester Digital
The Elements desktop hard drive is basic USB 3.0 plug-and-play external storage that works with Windows PCs out of the box and can be easily reformatted for Mac. It can be used for storage with Xbox and PlayStation consoles, too. Amazon has several capacities on sale at the moment starting at 4TB for $90, up to an absurd 18TB for $340.
Crucial
Fast pocket-size external drives like the Crucial X6 are an easy way to expand on your dwindling internal storage. They’re also indispensable if you need to quickly move large files between computers or want to create on-the-spot backups. SSDs are faster than hard disk drives, too, so you’ll do a lot less waiting around with one of these. This is a USB-C drive, however, so if you don’t have one of those on your computer, tablet or game console, you’ll need to get a USB-C-to-USB-A adapter.
The X6 comes in four capacities — 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB — and all of the sizes are discounted on Amazon and direct from Crucial.
Kingston
Need to beef up your internal storage in your laptop or desktop? This SSD gives you 2TB at an all-time low price.
Lexar
This is a speedy little card that you can use in your Chromebook, Nintendo Switch, phone or tablet. It should also be fast enough to use for recording 4K UHD-resolution video at 30 frames per second with your action cam as well as your drone. Need a full-size SD card or SSD instead? Lexar has those discounted, too, in addition to other storage capacities for its microSD cards.
Sandisk
Slot this into your gaming PC or laptop to speed up your performance while increasing your storage for movies, music, photos and games. I guess you could store docs and spreadsheets on it, too, if you must.
Samsung
A great option for upgrading an older laptop or a desktop with an empty 2.5-inch drive bay.
Seagate
If you were lucky enough to get your hands on a PS5 this year but you’re already running low on game storage, this FireCuda drive can be used to expand your game collection. It was one of the first to be available and compatible with the console’s internal storage slot. Newegg’s regular price is $250 for this SSD, and it was recently $210, but it’s now dropped to $190. Note, though, that at this price, the drive does not include a heatsink.
Western Digital
If you care more about storage capacity than all-out speed, this is a bargain for a 4TB SSD. It’s still going to be faster than a traditional hard drive, too. It’s currently priced at $360 but the price will drop to $290 for Nov. 26 and 27.