Western Digital knows that high-capacity drives are a priority for SSD buyers, and has responded by adding a new 8TB model to its WD Black SN850X range.
The SN850X series has been on the market for a few years, offering 1TB, 2TB and 4TB models, but this 8TB version is a recent addition.
Announced in July, the 8TB WD Black SN850X SSD uses the same 8-channel SanDisk controller found in the smaller capacities, but replaces the BiCS 5 flash with BiCS 6 TLC NAND, built with four 2TB packages consisting of 1024Gbit BiCS 6 chips stacked 16- high.
New king of high capacity
You’d expect this change to make the new drive faster than other models in the series, but it doesn’t.
If TweakTown explains in his review of the new drive: “512Gbit BiCS 5 flash is still slightly faster than 1024Gbit BiCS 6 – at least when it’s behind the same SanDisk controller that has always powered the SN850X series.” The drive features a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface and offers sequential read speeds of up to 7,200 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 6,600 MB/s. Random read and write speeds reach up to 1,200,000 IOPS, and it has an endurance of 4,800 TBW.
With this new 8TB model, Western Digital finally has a competitor for Phison E18 8TB SSDs, the best known of which is Sabrent’s Rocket 4 Plus 8TB. In its benchmarks TweakTown found that the WD Black SN850X 8TB SSD landed mid-table against smaller capacity drives in most tests, but comfortably outperformed the Phison 8TB. That result is no real surprise, since the Phison drive was introduced more than two years ago and is now somewhat outdated.
TweakTown called the WD Black SN850X 8TB SSD the “New King of High Capacity” in its review, giving it a 95% rating and noting, “The 8TB capacity point is indeed the rarest of the rare when it comes to NVMe SSDs for consumers. So far there have only been two. Of the two, the WD Black SN850X 8TB is vastly superior when it comes to user experience or performance that matters.”
The WD Black SN850X not only outpaced but undercut the Phison 8TB at $849.99 – several hundred dollars cheaper. The site also noted that a heatsink version is available for $899.99, making it an ideal option for the PlayStation 5 and other high-capacity storage needs.