The cheapest 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD on sale this World Backup Day costs $109.99, and that number is doing the day's real reporting. The drive is Kingston's NV3, cut 49 percent from a $215.99 list price at B&H Photo, and Tom's Hardware, which compiled the discount sheet, says of it that "given the AI boom, you won't find anything with these speeds at a better price right now."
Tom's Hardware is candid about why the pickings are thin, writing that "the elephant in the room is those NAND flash price increases caused by the boom in AI" and conceding this year's deals are not as strong as last year's. The site adds that only a few sales trickled through ahead of the event, with hopes of bigger discounts on the day itself. Decoded, a 49 percent cut that still lands at $110 a terabyte says less about retailer generosity than about where NAND list prices have gone.
Spinning disk is carrying the capacity math, as usual. Seagate's Expansion 22TB external sits at $389.99 at Best Buy, under $18 a terabyte, while the IronWolf Pro 16TB, a 7,200 RPM SATA NAS drive rated for continuous operation, is down $54 to $369.99 at Newegg. Set either against the Kingston deal and flash is running more than six times the cost per terabyte, and that is comparing sale price to sale price.
On the flash side the roundup leans on externals and QLC. Samsung's T7 4TB portable SSD is $215 off at $464.99, which still comes to $116 a terabyte over USB 3.2 Gen 2, and Crucial's P310 2TB, a Phison E27T controller riding 232-layer Micron QLC with a 220TB endurance rating, gets flagged as one of the cheapest 2TB drives from a name brand. When QLC with a modest write budget is the value pick, that is its own comment on the state of the NAND market.
The rest of the sheet is mostly the hardware around the storage: UGreen's four-bay DXP4800 Plus NAS at $583.99, Synology's two-bay DS223J at $179.99 and single-bay DS124 at $122.99, and a PNY 256GB high-endurance microSD at 56 percent off. A Seagate Portable 2TB USB hard drive at $98.81 anchors the budget end and includes a year of the company's Rescue Service, good for one lab-grade recovery attempt. Enclosures and NAS boxes are discounting readily; it is the flash that fills them that nobody can afford to mark down. For a backup refresh this year, the arithmetic points at hard drives for bulk copies and at paying for NAND only where the interface speed earns its keep.
Bootnote. The WD Elements 20TB in the roundup, $40 off with a promo code at Newegg, is what the trade calls shuckable: the drive can be pulled from its plastic enclosure and pressed into service as an internal SATA disk, a trick thrifty NAS builders have leaned on for years, though Tom's Hardware notes that doing so voids the warranty.
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