Introduction

Western Digital (or simply WD) is the world’s largest manufacturer of storage solutions, mostly known for their wide range of hard disk offerings. With their acquisition of SanDisk in 2016, WD became one of the largest manufacturers for flash storage, too.

In this review we’re checking out the WD Black SN7100 2 TB, which is the company’s newest consumer M.2 NVMe PCI-Express 4.0 solid-state drive. As the “Black” name suggests, this is a drive targeted at the high-end crowd, gamers in particular. I’m not sure why they changed the model number to be thousands now instead of hundreds (SN7100 vs SN770), but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter—we only care about performance and pricing, too, of course.

Under the hood we found a new WD in-house controller, the Polaris 3 A101-000172-A1, a 4-channel design optimized for DRAM-less operation. The NAND flash is Kioxia’s brand-new BiCS8 TLC with 218-layers.

The WD Black SN7100 is available in capacities of 500 GB ($60), 1 TB ($85) and 2 TB ($140). Endurance for these models is set to 300 TBW, 600 TBW and 1200 TBW, respectively. WD offers a five-year warranty with the SN7100.