WD Black SN850X with Heatsink 2TB SSD Review

To test real-life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.

We use the following folder/file types:

• 100GB data file.
• 60GB iso image.
• 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
• 50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
• 21GB 8K Movie demos.
• 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files).
• 11GB 4K Raw Movie Clips (8 MP4V files).
• 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of png, raw and jpeg images).
• 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files).
• 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
• Blu-ray movie.

The drive was pretty consistent when dealing with the larger file transfers in our real-life file transfer tests averaging 539.83MB/s writing six of the largest folders to the drive and 428MB/s when reading them back. The fastest transfer was for the BluRay movie (549MB/s) with the slowest being, as usual, the 50GB file folder transfer at 247MB/s.

To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSD's we use the same files but transfer to and from a 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus drive:

Swapping over to an all NVMe architecture saw transfer speeds rocket as you might expect. Three of the write transfers topped 3GB/s; 60GB iso 3,102MB/s, 100GB data file 3,102MB/s and the 5GB image, 3,092MB/s. Seven more topped 2.5GB/s while the slowest was the 50GB file folder with 955MB/s writing and 592MB/s reading.

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