WD Black SN850 1TB

Move over Samsung, there’s a new PCIe 4.0 storage king in town says Alan Dexter, as he reaches for the ermine-lined cloak.

SPECS

Model: SN850

Capacity: 1TB

Interface: PCIe Gen4 x4

Controller: WD_Black G2

NAND: BiCS4 96-layer TLC

Seq. read: 7,000MB/s

Seq. write: 5,300MB/s

Endurance: 600TBW

Warranty: Five years

The WD Black SN850 1TB drive is the fastest PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid-state drive you can buy right now. It may not top every test in every benchmark, but when it comes to real-world benchmarking, there’s nothing else that can touch it. Don’t get us wrong: it does well across the synthetic benchmarks, topping plenty of them, but there are a few places where the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus (See LXF274) or the Samsung 980 Pro have the edge. Yet overall that doesn’t take away from the fact that this is the pinnacle of storage now.

Western Digital was a bit late to the PCIe SSD party, but quickly made up for it with the WD SN750, which has long been a strong choice for anyone looking to build their own mid-range performance PC. If you’re still rocking a PCIe 3.0 platform, then it’s still a great option. The point here is that WD hasn’t come out of nowhere to grab the performance crown, and that its focus on performance has paid off.

It helps that Western Digital is in a great position for building quality SSDs, because it produces everything it needs in house, from the proprietary memory controller to the NAND flash and the RAM. This means the company can push everything that little bit harder than a manufacturer using off-the-shelf components, and it certainly shows with the SN850.

Feeling the heat