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.

Today, we’re reviewing the WD Black SN850 SSD, which is a high-end M.2 NVMe drive that introduces support for the PCI-Express 4.0 interface. Internally, the WD Black SN850 uses the new eight-channel SanDisk 20-82-10035-A1 controller, which Western Digital refers to as the WD G2. The flash chips are made by Toshiba and 96-layer TLC. A Nanya DRAM chip provides 1 GB of storage for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The WD Black SN850 comes in capacities of 500 GB ($120), 1 TB ($230), and 2 TB ($450). Endurance for these models is set to 300 TBW, 600 TBW, and 1200 TBW respectively. WD also offers a separate SKU that comes with a preinstalled heatsink, for a small price increase, of course. WD provides a five-year warranty for the SN850.