WD’S SN850 BLACK
With any group test, there’s always one that got away. That was particularly likely with this gathering of highperformance PCIe Gen 4 M.2 SSDs. After all, the market is positively heaving with options, all of them seriously speedy.
The most conspicuous absence, however, has to be the WD Black SN850. The 2TB version can be had for around $265, which puts it right in the XPG Gammix S70
2TB’s wheelhouse. But the SN850 has some conspicuous performance advantages. As you’d expect, it puts out really big sequential numbers. But so do all the other drives.
Instead, it’s the trickier— and arguably more critical for that sense of day-to-day response and performance— 4K random performance where the WD Black SN850 makes its mark.
In our previous testing, it cranks out a whisker over 90MB/s for reads and well above 300MB/s for writes, which would put it at the top of the table. Notably, it also outscores every drive here in PC Mark’s Storage benchmark.
Of course, it does all that while also offering the reassurance of the WD brand, which has been one of the best in the storage business for decades. To be frank, it makes the pricey Phisonbased SSDs look a tiny bit silly. It’s hard to imagine why you’d pay loads more for one of those when the excellent WD Black can be had for so much less.
It’s not perfect, of course. You could argue that its 96-layer SanDisk TLC NAND memory is a little long in the tooth. The SN850 also looks a little off the pace for sequential write performance.
The 2TB model’s rated write endurance of 1,200TB is nowhere near the best, either. But then the WD brand is so strong, we’d still have more confidence in the SN850 than some other drives with higher quoted endurance. You have to be in it to win it.
So, the WD Black SN850 might be a sideshow in this test, but it’s a pretty compelling sideshow, it has to be said.