The WD_BLACK SN8100 Is Very Fast, But P5800X Fast?

That’s A Name I Haven’t Heard In A Long Time

TweakTown recently took a look at the SanDisk WD Black SN8100 2TB SSD, an NVMe SSD using a modified Silicon Motion SM2508 PCIe 5.0 controller and Sandisk BiCS8 3D TLC memory.  The branding of the SanDisk WD Black SN8100 marks the beginning of the sale of products under the Sandisk name by Western Digital.  WD bought SanDisk 10 years ago, and this represents the beginning of Western Digital separating its flash storage business from it’s HDD business.  It may look strange now, but we will have to get used to it.

As to the performance versus the Optane P5800X, if you look at the sequential reads and writes of 14.9 GB/s and 14.1 GB/s it blows past the old Optane part and leaves the competition in the dust.  Indeed after testing, the SN8100 is the highest rated drive at TweakTown, and not by a small margin.  However when you look at random reads and writes, this old Optane review shows that Intel’s extremely pricey solution is in a completely different class.  TweakTown didn’t do latency testing, but again the Optane drive leaves the new WD Black SN8100 in the dust.

That said, for the workloads that most people use daily the new SN8100 is a better choice for performance and when it comes to pricing, the new drive outclasses the old Optane drive as immensely as the Optane does at non-sequential tasks.