WD Black NVMe 1TB SSD Review

Rating: 9.0.

WD's first NVMe drive to carry the Black label – the Black PCIe – was something of a disappointment in terms of performance, to say the least. While it was true to say that it was, up till now, the fastest ever Black drive, it was no match for many of its direct competitors. Now we have the 2nd generation NVMe Black drive – the WD Black NVMe, and it's a whole different animal.

The original Black PCIe drive used a combination of a Marvell controller and SanDisk 15nm TLC Planer NAND. The new drive has upped the ante with the debut of WD's own NVMe controller combined with SanDisk's 64-layer BiCS 3D TLC NAND.

The new Black NVMe drive comes in three capacities; 250GB (WDS250G2X0C), 500GB (WDS500G2X0C) and the flagship 1TB (WDS100T2X0C) drive that WD kindly supplied for review. The previous drive just came in two sizes – 256GB and 512GB.

The official figures for the new drives are mightily impressive. Sequential reads for the entry 250GB model are up to 3,000MB/s, while the 500GB and 1TB drive share the same up to 3,400MB/s figure. Sequential writes climb with capacity; 250GB up to 1,600MB/s, 500GB up to 2,500MB/s and the 1TB model up to 2,800MB/s.

Random read/write figures for the range are up to 220,000 IOPS and 170,000 IOPs respectively for the 250GB drive, the 500GB drive is rated as up to 330,000 IOPS for reads and 410,000 IOPS for writes while the 1TB drive is rated as up to 500,000 IOPS for reads and up to 400,000 IOPS for writes.

Endurance TBW figures for the range is 200 for the 200GB drive, 300 for the 500GB and 600 for the 1TB model. WD backs the drive with a 5 year warranty.

Specifications:

• Usable Capacities: 1TB
• NAND Components: SanDisk BiCS 3D TLC NAND
• NAND Controller: WD
• Cache: 1024MB
• Interface: PCIe Gen3.0 x4 NVMe
• Form Factor: M.2 2280
• Dimensions: 80 x 22 x 2.38mm
• Drive Weight: 7.5g

Firmware Version: 101020WD

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