WD Black SN850

Staggering performance and handy extras make this a worthy silver medallist

SCORE

PRICE 1TB, £154 (£185 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324sam2

READ SPEED 5,468MB/ SEC

WRITE SPEED 3,944MB/ SEC

Samsung’s 980 Pro is a premium NVMe SSD with support for PCI Express Gen4. In theory, that should allow it to run twice as fast as its mid-range counterpart ( see left) – and to our delight and amazement it actually does, achieving a 110% speed boost over the 970 Evo Plus in our sequential read speed test. Write speeds aren’t quite as spectacular, but they’re still 70% faster than you’ll get from the cheaper drive, thanks partly to an onboard 1GB SDRAM cache.

These raw speeds translate to first-class real-world performance. The PCMark 10 benchmark gave the 980 Pro an excellent system disk score of 2,977 – a silver-medal showing, beaten only by WD’s Black SN850 SSD. It works brilliantly as a data drive too, though we’re sure no one’s buying the 980 Pro for everyday file storage.

While the 980 Pro is far faster than the 970 Evo Plus, it comes with the same accoutrements. That means standardscompliant full-disk encryption, and the Samsung Magician app for managing and benchmarking your disk. It would have been nice to have some cloning software thrown in, but you can get that for free – see our feature on p38.

In fact, the only thing standing between the Samsung 980 Pro and our Labs Winner award is that pesky WD Black SN850, which somehow delivers even better performance for £17 less. But if that doesn’t suit your needs – for example, if you need a drive with encryption – this SSD makes a superb top-shelf choice for any computer with a compatible slot.