slots, and plenty of third-party solutions exist that are cheaper than the preinstalled and LED enhanced WD solution.

WD Black SN850 2TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 Gen4 NVMe SSD PC - Scan

The WD_BLACK Dashboard monitors the health of your drive, control of RGB lighting and exclusively on the SN850X, Game Mode 2. The 500GB didn’t perform as well as the larger capacities, and the demand for larger sizes is one WD couldn’t continue to ignore. Another dominating performance provides more evidence that the WD Black SN850 is currently the best performing SSD on the market.

That means that this review won't be able to declare an outright winner for the consumer SSD performance crown, but that's not a big deal. The variance of performance by capacity is due to the amount of parallelism in each drive with the flash modules, the amount of cache and the WD_BLACK G2 controllers’ ability to manage the throughput. The 2TB version that I didn’t test uses 512Gb BiCS4 96L TLC flash dies, where the 1TB we tested and the 500GB option both use 256GB dies, and all use a dual-plane layout for extra throughput. The WD Black SN850 doesn’t break any of those specification rules, being ostensibly an edge-connecting stick designed to fit into a de facto 2280 M.

Western Digital SN850 2 TB Specs | TechPowerUp SSD Database

WD supports the Black SN850 with WD Dashboard, the company’s SSD toolbox that includes analysis tools, a firmware updater, and RGB lighting control on the heatsink model. Use of an internal HDD in a RAID configuration or device will void the Data Recovery Plan purchased with the product. Looking at the results above, this tells us that there’s not a huge difference between all of the Gen4 SSDs. However, with a Samsung SSD, you can take advantage of the company’s proprietary software; like the Magician and Data Migration.

In the AJA System test, we can see that the Samsung 980 Pro 2TB is almost neck and neck with the WD Black SN850 2TB in sequential read. Unless you edit 4K or higher resolution video every day on the system, you are highly unlikely to hit these limits for some considerable time. It has a label on one side covering the surface mounted chips and a few visible tracks on the underside, as 99% of NVMe drives do. This will give us a more realistic expectation of a drive’s performance and a closer to a real-world testing scenario.