WD Black SN850 1TB SSD Review

Rating: 9.0.

The latest addition to WD's ever-growing range of Black performance and gaming products is the SN850 NVMe M.2 SSD. The new drive is the company's first foray into the PCIe Gen 4 market segment. We check out the 1TB model, priced at £210 here in the UK.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Start
00:13 A Gift for me ?
00:28 A letter from Simon Crisp (KitGuru SSD editor)
01:18 Hardware recap
02:23 The SN850 Gen 4 Black
03:34 January’s possible update (with heatsink)
03:50 More details / AMD platform / reviewers guide
04:59 Testing and results
06:43 Simons results and closing thoughts

WD's new drive comes in three capacities at the time of writing – 500GB, 1TB and a 2TB flagship model. The drive uses a combination of an in-house WD G2 controller and 96-layer BiCS4 3D NAND. The SN850 was launched as a standard M.2 2280 drive, but coming along at a later date will be a version with an RGB-equipped heatsink, in a similar vein to the previous SN750, although that one didn't have fancy lights in it.

Sequential read performance for all three drives is quoted as up to 7,000MB/s while Sequential writes vary with capacities. The 500GB drive is rated as up to 4,100MB/s, the 1TB drive 5,300MB/s (the fastest write speed in the range) and the 2TB model 5,100MB/s.

Random read performance is quoted as up to 800,000 IOPS for the 500GB with the 1TB and 2TB drives are rated up to 1,000,000 IOPS, yep that's a million IOPS. As for random writes, the 500GB drive is rated up to 570,000 IOPS, the 1TB drive 720,000 IOPS with the 2TB drive a little slower at up to 710,000 IOPS.

Endurance for the 1TB drive we are reviewing here is quoted as up to 600TBW. Incidentally, the 500GB drive is rated as 300TBW and the 2TB drive 1,200TBW. WD back the SN850 with a 5-year warranty.

Physical Specifications:

• Usable Capacities: 1TB.
• NAND Components: WD 96-layer BiCS4 3D NAND.
• NAND Controller: WD Black G2.
• Cache: 1GB DDR4 DRAM.
• Interface: PCIe 4.0, NVMe
• Form Factor: M.2 2280.
• Dimensions: 22.15 x 80.15 x 2.38mm.
• Drive Weight: 7.5g.

Firmware Version: 611100WD.

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