WD Black SN850 WDS100T1X0E 1 TB

without radiator

Race leader

The WD Black SN850 is the flagship PCI-E 4.0 x4 SSD in both Western Digital's lineup and the market as a whole. If it has competitors in sequential read speed of 7000 MB / s, then in terms of write speed it is faster than absolutely everyone without exception — 5300 MB / s for the 1 TB version. Also available are 500 GB and 2 TB modifications with the same read speed, but slightly lower write speed: 4100 and 5100 MB / s, respectively.

Own production

The WD Black SN850 is built on a proprietary controller and SanDisk flash memory (previously, these two companies merged). The memory type is, of course, 3D TLC with a smart caching algorithm. So, the volume of the virtual SLC array is as much as a third of the volume of the disk, that is, in the case of a terabyte — 333 GB. This means that the disk is capable of writing at maximum speed (5300 MB / s for a terabyte) even a very large amount of data at a time.

Everything will fit

After the cache is full, the write speed of the WD Black SN850 is temporarily reduced to about 1000 MB / s, after which the disk needs time to re-cache. The overwriting warranty (TWB) is 600 TB for a terabyte, or a third of the disk capacity per day for five years (0.3 DWPD). You can track the remaining overwriting resource using the convenient proprietary WD Dashboard application.

Not hot stuff

As a result, the WD Black SN850 is an uncompetitively fast M.2 NVMe SSD, which, even in a non-radiator configuration, surprisingly heats up a little (45°C in idle, 75°C in the AIDA64 warm-up test). And the aluminium heatsink version with RGB lighting is even cooler (optimal for desktops, not laptops). Finally, we note that the WD Black SN850 can work at full speed only on motherboards with a PCI-E 4.0 x4 interface, but so far these are only AMD B550, X570 and TR40 chipsets. Owners of motherboards with PCI-E 3.0 should probably limit themselves to the WD Black SN750 with speeds up to 3500 Mbps.