PC World - USA (2021-01)

JANUARY 2021 PCWorld 57

WD Black SN850 NVMe SSD

(2TB)

PROS

• Extremely fast.


• Fastest 450GB write time to date.
  CONS


• Expensive.
  BOTTOM LINE
  The WD Black SN850 NVMe SSD is one of the very
  best consumer NVMe SSDs you can buy currently,
  with outstanding performance, especially on writes.
  The price is high, but if you have the PCIe 4 interface
  that unlocks its greatest powers, this drive is worth
  the investment.
  $449

2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia)
GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an
Asmedia ASM2142 USB 3.1 card. It also
contains a Gigabyte GC-Alpine Thunderbolt
3 card, and Softperfect Ramdisk 3.4.6 for the
48GB read and write tests.
The PCIe 4 testing was done on an MSI
MEG X570 motherboard socketing an AMD
Ryzen 7 3700X 8-core CPU, using the same
Kingston DRAM, cards, and software. All
testing is performed on an empty, or nearly
empty drive. Performance will decrease as the
drive fills up.

VERDICT
The WD Black SN850 is a fantastic NVMe
SSD, proving itself a little to a lot faster writing
large files than other drives. The Samsung
980 Pro is a faster reader and probably the

better all-around performer, but by a slim

margin. If you’re looking for the ultimate in

single SSD PCIe4 storage performance, you

won’t go wrong with either. Your choice.