WD_BLACK SN850X 2TBM.2 2280 Game Drive PCIe Gen4 NVMe up to 7300 MB/s

Product Information

Get the ultimate gaming edge over your competition with insane speeds up to 7,300 MB/s for top-level performance and ridiculously short load times. A new suite of features comes with the SN850X including Predictive Loading, Overhead Balancing and Adaptive Thermal Management 5. Soup up your gaming experience with extremely low latency that loads graphics fast with minimal stutter and lagging for smooth, satisfying action. This is a fairly noticeable increase compared to the 2020 SN850 model’s 7GB/s read and 5.3GB/s write in sequential and 1 million IOPS in 4K random performance. The SN850 also only offers up to 2TB in capacity, so the 4TB model is a nice addition to match the ever-growing game installation sizes. Today’s A-list titles can take up 200GB 2 or more of storage. A range of capacities from 1TB to 4TB 2 means you get to keep more games at the ready and get into the action fast.

This test uses SQL Server 2014 running on Windows Server 2012 R2 guest VMs and is stressed by Quest’s Benchmark Factory for Databases. StorageReview’s Microsoft SQL Server OLTP testing protocol employs the current draft of the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s Benchmark C (TPC-C), an online transaction-processing benchmark that simulates the activities found in complex application environments. WD improved performance in sequential read workloads, with a maximum of 7.3GBps from 7.0GBps, and sequential writes improved from up to 5.3GBps to 6.6GBps. Performance in random workloads has also improved significantly, up from a maximum of 1M / 720,000 read and write, respectively, to 1.2M / 1.1M. WD also implemented new updates to improve thermal consistency and energy efficiency via smoothing out the thermal throttling step function. WD Management Dashboard Each SQL Server VM is configured with two vDisks: 100GB volume for boot and a 500GB volume for the database and log files. From a system resource perspective, we configured each VM with 16 vCPUs, 64GB of DRAM and leveraged the LSI Logic SAS SCSI controller. While our Sysbench workloads tested previously saturated the platform in both storage I/O and capacity, the SQL test is looking for latency performance. Today’s A-list titles can take up 200GB or more of storage. A range of capacities from 1TB to 4TB means you get to keep more games at the ready and get into the action fast.The SN850X is competitive with other high-end PCIe 4.0 drives in sequential workloads, but it can’t quite match the SK hynix Platinum P41 in random IOPS. Pricing is a bit stiff, particularly at 4TB. The SN850X will have to impress to justify its MSRP. Game Mode 2.0, Software and Accessories Starting with SQL average latency, the SN850X posted 3ms, which placed it in the upper part of the consumer NVMe SSD leaderboard. All of these tests leverage the common vdBench workload generator, with a scripting engine to automate and capture results over a large compute testing cluster. This allows us to repeat the same workloads across a wide range of storage devices, including flash arrays and individual storage devices. Our testing process for these benchmarks fills the entire drive surface with data, then partitions a drive section equal to 1% of the drive capacity to simulate how the drive might respond to application workloads. This is different than full entropy tests which use 100% of the drive and take them into a steady state. As a result, these figures will reflect higher-sustained write speeds. While SSD tuning software such as this often doesn’t show any noticeable real-world gains, it does allow users to perform firmware upgrades via the application (among other things), which is more functionality than many other companies provide. You can also see (at a glance) the drive’s overall health, interface speed, temperatures and capacity information. Overall the software is nice to have but won’t deliver “felt” performance to the end user. Warranty and Pricing Moving onto sequential read 64K, the SN850X performed very well with 5.93GB/s (or 94,512 IOPS) with 337µs latency for second place. Again, this was an improvement over its predecessor, which posted a peak of 5.57GB/s (891K IOPS) at 354 µs.

To those that doubt the veracity of our assertion that BiCS 4 performs better than Micron B47R or Samsung V-NAND, we can and have demonstrated this on multiple occasions. Whenever everything is equivalent except the flash (same controller, same DRAM), good ole 96 Layer BiCS 4 arrayed SSDs easily outperform 176 Layer B47R arrayed SSDs. A good example is the M10P vs. S70 Blade or FX900 Pro. B47R is more prolific but has never outperformed BiCS, period - end of story. Half the layers, older and still the better performer; that's just how superior BiCS architecture has proven to be. And we don't even need to get into how much better BiCS 4 is than V-NAND because even B47R arrayed SSDs easily outperform Samsung's V-NAND arrayed 980 Pro. Extremely low latency loads graphics fast with minimal stutter and lagging for an incredibly smooth, satisfying gaming experience.Recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch. UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. We consider it superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs on the actual game itself. This test is in fact the same as running the actual game, just without the inconsistencies inherent to application testing. Of particular note is the Game Mode 2.0 feature that's new with the SN850X. The original Gaming Mode could be turned on or off within the Dashboard, but Game Mode 2.0 has an additional Auto setting to detect game launches. You can also manually enter game folder locations so the software knows where to watch.

Insane speeds up to 7,300 MB/s deliver top-tier performance with ridiculously short load times for the elite gaming experience you’ve been waiting for. The SN850X had weak random write performance, though it did display an improvement over its predecessor with a peak of 187K IOPS at a latency of 678.7µs (vs. 173K IOPS and 733.9µs for the SN850). Recognized for its blend of speed, dependability, and practical features, this SSD delivers an advanced thermal regulation system as well. This innovative feature diligently works to maintain ideal operating temperatures, effectively preventing overheating and ensuring consistent high-speed operation. In addition, the SN850X gains a considerable advantage in the competitive SSD market through its compatibility with Western Digital's dashboard management software. This user-friendly platform gives users insights into their SSD's health, status, and space utilisation, and impressively does it instantaneously. SN850X: Price UK

PCMark 10 Storage Test is the most advanced and most accurate real-world consumer storage test ever made. There are four different tests you can choose from; we run two of them. WD's NAND technology still lags behind its competitors, with its 112-Layer BiCS5 flash competing against 176-Layer flash from Micron and SK hynix. However, this has advantages, as WD's mature flash can be carefully and reliably binned. BiCS5 also has 1Tb dies available for higher-capacity SSDs. The latest version of Game Mode serves up even more PC performance-boosting features like load prediction to ready game assets for fast in-game loading. Game Mode 2.0 also features an advanced “read look ahead” algorithm, which predicts and pre-emptively caches what is next in the game. WD indicates that this is done by allowing the SN850X’s controller to detect incoming low queue depth, sequential workloads, claiming that it will help speed up in-game loading of scenes, levels and other areas.

The 1TB and 2TB drives have an optional version with RGB lighting plus heatsink to help maintain peak performance through the most intense gaming sessions. (Please choose the heatsink model for this)In our SQL Server application test aimed at developers or homelab users, the SN850X showed a solid 3ms in latency, placing it near the top of the leaderboard of the other tested drives. While it wasn’t leaps and bounds better than its predecessor (the SN850), it did show noticeable improvements over a drive that is still considered a great-performance drive at almost 2 years old. Considering it and its predecessor both employ the very same SanDisk 8-channel controller with the only difference being 256Gbit BiCS 4 vs. 512Gbit BiCS 5, we find this result to be powerful evidence that 512Gbit BiCS 5 flash is indeed faster than 256Gbit BiCS 4, but slightly slower than 176L hynix. PCM10 Storage Tests