To celebrate World Back Up day allow me to present to you a 2 TB SSD for under 5 cents per GB

Back the f up, it's World Back Up day. And that is a time to remind everyone—from Joe and Josephine Public to Ms Big Bucks Corpo—about the importance of backing up your most important pictures and docs, and to just keep your vital data secure. But to effectively back up, in this world of ever-expanding data costs, you're going to need ever more storage space.

And that can be expensive... unless you wait 'til the sales and bag a quality SSD with a large capacity for packing in tons of pics and game saves. For today we have the Silicon Power UD90, an inexpensive PCIe 4.0 drive that, while it won't set any records for straight-line speed, will provide a whole lot of storage space speedy enough for anyone's needs.

Quick links

• Silicon Power UD90 | 2 TB | 5,000 MB/s read | 4,800 MB/s write | $95 @ B&H Photo
• Silicon Power UD90 | 4 TB | 5,000 MB/s read | 4,500 MB/s write | $208 @ Amazon

The drives

Silicon Power UD90 | 2 TB | NVMe | PCIe 4.0 | 5,000 MB/s read | 4,800 MB/s write | $119.97 $94.97 at B&H Photo (save $25)
You might not know Silicon Power from Samsung, but this SSD is well-received by our friends at Tom's Hardware. It offers plenty of speed for a Steam library expansion but with a meager cost per gigabyte of just under five cents. It's not the fastest SSD out there, though, but will be plenty fast enough for all but the most number-hungry of SSD benchmarkers.

Price check: Newegg $95.97 | Amazon $99.97

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The Silicon Power UD90 is available in 2 TB trim for just $95 at B&H Photo right now. That's cheaper than both Amazon and Newegg.

Whether you're looking to jam it into a spare M.2 slot in your laptop or desktop gaming PC or slap it into a simple external enclosure for easy backups, this drive will serve you well. It's not just a great backup SSD, though, as its middling read/write performance will be effectively invisible if you just want it as an extension of your Steam Library.

The perceptible performance difference between even the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD and this mid-level PCIe 4.0 drive is minimal at the very, very worst. And the very cheapest PCIe 5 drive I can find today is a Crucial CS2150 at $175, or nearly nine cents per gigabyte. In short, PCIe 5.0 drives are still not worth the outlay if you're looking for actually visible performance differences.

Silicon Power UD90 | 4 TB | NVMe | PCIe 4.0 | 5,000 MB/s read | 4,500 MB/s write | $239.99 $207.99 at Amazon (save $32)
This Silicon Power might not be the fastest of drives, but it's difficult to argue with this much storage for this sort of money. With a sequential read/write of 5,000 MB/s and 4,500 MB/s, it's still not what you'd call slow and should be fine for gaming, plus it comes from a reliable brand.

Price check: Newegg $207.99 | B&H PHoto $209.99

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And if you're willing to pay that much for a new SSD, then why not go even bigger? The 4 TB version of the Silicon Power UD90 is on sale for $208 over at Amazon and that's only a teeny tiny bit over five cents per gigabyte.

So yeah, there's not excuse not to back up at that price, eh?