So Long Samsung, Hello WD Black SN850

1,000,000 random read IOPS, Just As Advertised

If you are looking for the best overall PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, your search is over with the arrival of Western Digital’s WD Black SN850 which outshines their previous SN750 by a fair margin.  Of course part of this is because of the increased bandwidth of the new PCIe generation, however the Samsung 980 Pro uses the same interface and the SN850 outpaces it in almost every test.  If you want a faster drive, you will have to fork out for Optane.

Inside the drive you will find 96 Layer BiCS4 flash and a G2 controller with a proper DDR4 cache, reputedly offering sequential read/write of 7000MB/s and 5300MB/s respectively.  As for the performance we are interested in, the drive does indeed hit 1000000 IOPS read and 750,000 IOPS write.

You should also check out the WD Dashboard section of Tweaktown’s review, as it offers a bit more than just a way to clone your drive, numerous tools help you configure the SSD for the best speed available even if you aren’t overly familiar with the intricacies of SSD architecture.