The new ssd king? Tweaktown has the new WD Black SN 850 Questioned 1TB NVMe SSD and was positively surprised. Not so long ago, the testers of this website crowned the Samsung 980 Pro 1TB to SSD King, but it looks like Samsung has a formidable opponent.

The WD Black SN 850 is available in three different sizes, 500 GB, 1TB and 2TB. Tweaktown has started working on the 1TB drive. These SSDs come standard with WD Dashboard and Acronis cloning software. Tweaktown recommends turning on “Gaming Mode” for best performance. The same goes for enabling write caching.

The reviewers have subjected the drive to a lot of benchmarks and the results are surprisingly good. In CrystalDiskMark the SN 850 gets 1TB 7071, 41 MB / s at the SEQ1M Read test, knocking the Samsung 980 Pro of the throne. In the SEQ1M Write test, the Western Digital drive also manages to leave the Samsung SSD behind. With 5245, 86 MB / s beats the 980 Pro, Which 4953, 07 Get MB / s.

With the RND4K test, the SN 850 passes the 980 Pro on the heels. Western Digital drive fetches 91, 60 MB / s, while Samsung ssd with 92, 13 MB / s is just a step ahead. In that respect, both drives have to lose out to the Intel Optane 905 P. This drive is listed with 280, 50 MB / s invariably tops the list.

The Anvil benchmarks change the picture little. In the read test, Western Digital’s drive scores 10480, 20 points, achieving a slightly lower score than the 980 Pro, which 10537, 57 points. In the write test, the WD Black SN 850 is again number one thanks to a score of 15667, 69 points. The 980 Pro ranks third with 12564, 21 points. It is striking that in the total scores Western Digital comes first and even the Optane 905 P leaves behind. According to Tweaktown, it is the first time that a consumer SSD has achieved such a high score. The same goes for the number of random read iops . Western Digital gets more than 921000.

Also with the AS SSD and ATTO benchmarks the money is changing although the WD Black SN 850 ends up at the top more often than the 980 Pro and the Western Digital drive also breaks records when it tops the Samsung drive.

The difference gets slightly smaller at the real world benchmarks , although the drives still alternate. Samsung tops the list with 1241 MB / s at the NodeSoft DiskBench Write Transfer Test, closely followed by the SN 850 with 1190 points. In the Read Transfer test it is again the SN 850 that with 3573 MB / s ends in first place and is chased by the 980 Pro with 3449 MB / s. In PCMark, the Western Digital drive manages to take the crown in every test and again increase the difference between the two drives.

Tweaktown therefore concludes that the WD Black SN 850 may be crowned the new consumer SSD king. The testers did not expect Western Digital to achieve such a performance.

Read the full review at Tweaktown: Storage SSDs WD Black SN 850 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD Review