WD Black SN850X 8TB NVMe SSD Review

That’s eight terabytes of storage on a single PCIe SSD. Oh really. We’ve come a long way since the conception of M.2 solid-state storage, haven’t we? This beautiful, sleek little number from Western Digital pushes the limits of what’s currently possible with the amount of storage you can get in a single device. It is nothing more than a marvel of engineering. But in its wake it raises some pretty powerful questions. Not only from the stereotypical hardware review perspective, but also from a use case angle. Simply put, who is this for? How can you justify 8TB of storage in the modern era of blazing fast internet speeds and near-perfect cloud storage solutions?

WD’s SN850X SSDs aren’t exactly new to the field either. we review WD SN850X Line when it first debuted to the world in October 2022. But at last, Joe Public has finally received an 8TB upgrade from the company. Complete with a revised controller, much denser NAND, and a really high price.

For core technology, the 8TB variant runs a proprietary Sandisk controller built on the back of its Triton MP16+ B2 platform (the same one found in the original lineup). Combine that with Kioxia’s 162-layer BiCS6 TLC NAND, powered in four separate packages in the device. It’s then backed by a healthy slab of DDR4 to keep everything nicely organized and of course it all comes packaged in that ever-faithful M.2 2280 form factor (although it’s double-sided) complete with a heatsink option if it is necessary. he.

As for cost, well, since the initial release of the 8TB, WD has given it a pretty intuitive whack on the head with a pretty big price-cutting hammer. You can now buy one of these for around $650 in the US (it debuted at $850). It’s a smart move, given that two 4TB WD SN850Xs will cost you just $600 total. Basically, WD has to do a balancing act with this. At the same time, you need to keep stock flowing on older units without compromising sales on your new launch. As a result, expect these prices to change quite a bit, especially during sale seasons.

SN850X Specifications

The WD Black SN850X 8 TB out of the packaging. — (Image credit: future)

Ability: 8TB
Interface: PCIe 4.0 x4
Memory controller: Owner (Triton MP16+ B2)
Flash memory: Kioxia BiCS6 162-layer TLC NAND
Rated performance: 7200 MB/s sustained read, 6600 MB/s sustained write
Endurance: 4,800 TBW
Warranty: five years
Price: $649 | £647 | 1,331 Australian dollars

In terms of performance, the 8TB SN850X puts on quite a show. Sequential figures on the Crystal Disk Mark sat comfortably at around 7,100 MB/s for reading and 6,590 MB/s for writing in my tests. Both are respectable for a 4.0 drive and about what WD claims it will compete at, although slightly below advertised on both. Random 4K though, well that’s more of a cause for concern. With speeds of just 72MB/s read and 298MB/s write, it’s one of the slowest modern PCIe 4.0 drives I’ve tested, second only to Samsung 990 Evo Plus.

That’s a bit of a problem, especially if you’re thinking of using it for a gaming unit.

Unfortunately, much smaller SSDs, such as Crucial P310 or WD itself SN770M run rings around it in that metric. The SN770M clocks in at 79 and 305 MB/s respectively, and the P310 also manages a svelte 76 and 315 MB/s. Even WD’s Blue SN5000, a much cheaper Kioxia 162-layer QLC alternative, managed to hold its own at at least 80 MB/s in 4K reading. That didn’t exactly translate into our gameplay tests, of course, with Final Fantasy XIV’s Shadowbringers benchmark clocking in at a respectable 7.283 seconds on average.

Those slower read and write speeds are likely due to an increase in latency as a result of the 8TB SN850X housing four NAND chips instead of the two, or even one, found in those alternative drives. That then slows down overall read and write speeds across the board, albeit slightly. That also lines up nicely with the SN850X’s other capacity option marketing materials, as they’re all listed at 7,300 MB/s read, rather than the 7,200 found on the 8TB.

That’s also probably one of the main reasons why WD chose Kioxia’s much denser NAND to facilitate the 8TB, since it’s much faster, but still not enough to reach the same speed as its predecessors.

Testbed for PC gamers
UPC: AMD Ryzen 99900X | RAM: 64 GB (2×32 GB) Group Team T-Create Expert DDR5 @ 6000 C34 | GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super | Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi | CPU Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | Power Supply: 1200W NZXT C1200 (2024) 80+ Gold | Chassis: Geometric Future Model 5

The most important question you should ask yourself is: is it worth it? From a purely practical level, having an 8TB drive like this (7.27TB on Windows for the curious) is a bit risky.

As a manufacturer, if your goal is for your SSD to become one of the best SSD At any given time, reliability and resilience are key elements in that journey. And in no way am I saying that WD doesn’t have a reputation for those two things; it really does. But, like all SSDs, these have a life cycle and data cells that can become corrupted and degrade. Things can go wrong.

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Buy if…

You want the highest possible capacity: Whether on a PC or a PS5 Pro, WD’s SN850X has the most storage we’ve ever seen in a single device.

Don’t buy if…

You’re looking for the best value and highest reliability: Two 4TB SN850Xs are not only cheaper, but also provide a little more peace of mind when it comes to reliability.

If you’re just storing all of your games, media, or important documentation on a single 8TB drive, without a proper backup solution, and everything goes wrong, or your house gets struck by lightning and fries everything, that’s a critical mistake. that could cost you much more than the value of the drive itself.

From a gaming perspective, is the convenience gained worth the cost? If you already have a solid internet connection, randomly downloading, playing, deleting, and redownloading is also not such an arduous task. Which again hits the SN850X 8 TB on the nose a bit. Sure, if you spend days downloading the latest Diablo IV expansion, then maybe it’s worth it, but even then, you’re probably much better off having much cheaper and slightly faster twin 4TB PCIe 4.0 drives. It’s much more practical, at least if your motherboard can support it.

Still, that aside, what’s fascinating about this momentum isn’t really what it represents now, but what it means for the future.

When the initial 4TB variant was launched in 2022, it had an RRP of an incredible $700. Today, as of this writing, you can buy one for just $292. That’s a price drop to just 41% of what it was at launch, in the space of two years. This is a radical price cut, and the same applies to its competition as well. With this in mind, will 2026 finally be the year we get 4TB SSDs for $140 and this 8TB solution doesn’t seem so crazy? I’m hopeful, that’s for sure, and I hope this is all a moot point.

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