WD Black SN850 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD Review
Western Digital seemingly comes out of nowhere and delivers the best performing flash-based SSD we've ever tested with the SN850.
Jon Coulter
@JonCoulterSSD
PUBLISHED MON, NOV 9 2020 12:23 AM CST | UPDATED MON, NOV 9 2020 1:02 AM CST
Introduction & Drive Details
A little over a month ago, we crowned Samsung's 980 Pro 1TB as the best performing flash-based SSD we've ever tested. Like almost everyone else, we figured we would be looking at an upcoming showdown between Phison, Samsung, and maybe SMI for the Gen4 SSD performance crown. Well, stop the presses because, on Friday of last week, an unexpected package showed up at the lab that changes everything we assumed.
While everyone has been talking about Gen4 SSDs by Samsung, Phison, and SMI, WD has been quietly perfecting a Gen4 contender of their own. I mean, yeah, we all heard about it, but Western Digital's incoming Black SN850 Gen4 SSD did not seem to garner much attention. This is probably because their Gen3 flagship SSD, the WD Black SN750, made its living at the bottom of the performance ladder. In fact, we rank Western Digital's own WD Blue SN550 4-channel DRAMless value SSD far above the WD Black SN750 in terms of real performance (user experience).
We assumed the WD Black SN850 would likely be another low-performance drive with good to great sequential numbers, much like its predecessor. Man were we ever wrong. We should again point out for the millionth time that contrary to popular mythology, sequential numbers have little to do with what makes an SSD fast. Do you need proof? Consider for a moment the fastest consumer SSD ever made, Intel's 905P, only reaches sequential speeds of 2,700/2300 MB/s.
In a nutshell, we are trying to convey that if you want the performance crown, you better bring a lot more than eye-popping sequential numbers to the table. What you better be bringing if you even want to be mentioned in the conversation is random performance at low queue depths. Western Digital's WD Black SN850 brings it all. It is the most potent mix of everything that makes a flash-based SSD fast that we've experienced to date.
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