54 PCWorld JANUARY 2021REVIEWS
The WD Black SN850 gives
you a second great choice
when it comes to pick-of-the-
litter NVMe SSDs—Samsung’s
980 Pro (go.pcworld.com/98pr) being the
other. This assumes, of course, that your
motherboard sports a cutting-edge PCIe 4.0
interface (go.pcworld.com/pc40). Currentlythat means late-generation AMD Ryzen (go.
pcworld.com/lgen) with Intel’s next-gen piling
on soon. If that’s not you, a PCIe 4 SSD is still
a good way to future-proof your performance.
The 2280 (22mm wide, 80mm long) form
factor SN850 uses 96-layer TLC (Triple-Level
Cell/3-bit) NAND and a custom controller. It
ships in three flavors: 500GB ($149.99 fromWD Black SN850 NVMe SSD:
Fantastic sustained write speeds
via PCIe 4.0
This new PCIe 4 NVMe SSD is like-priced and about as fast as its mighty
Samsung rival. BY JON L. JACOBIIMAGE: WD