To the editorial board of the portal GameMAG.ru the test got a solid state drive from the company Western digital – WD Black SN850 1TB (WDS100T1X0E-00AFY0). it NVMe SSD with interface PCIe Gen4 x4 for connector M.2 2280…
There are 500 GB versions of the drive with and without a heatsink on sale at prices from 11,000 rubles, 1 TB from 19,000 rubles and 2 TB from 46,000 rubles (according to the website E-Katalog.ru as of June 2023).
APPEARANCE AND TECHNICAL CHARACTERISTICS
WD Black SN850 comes in a black cardboard box with a picture of the device on the front and a small window on the back. Inside the box, the disc is packed in a protective package. Also inside you will find a brochure with technical support information and a 5-year limited warranty.
The dimensions for M.2 SSDs are usually 80mm x 22mm x 2.38mm. The device will easily fit not only into a PC, but also into a laptop. The design of the printed circuit board is made in the corporate black color for the BLACK series. All microcircuits are located on the top side of the board, which are covered with a sticker with technical information about the device. There are no elements on the underside, and it is covered with a black protective varnish.
The manufacturer claims sequential read speeds up to 7000 MB / s and sequential write speeds up to 5300 MB / s. The 500 GB and 2 TB versions have more modest write values - 4100 and 5100 MB / s, respectively. Working temperature – from 0 to 70 degrees Celsius. The recording resource of the tested sample is designed for 600 TB.
TESTS
Due to the fact that a test bench with PCIe Gen4 support has not yet appeared in the edition, we tested this SSD in PCIe Gen3 mode. For this we used a compact PC – Intel NUC 9 Extreme Kit with the following configuration:
- Intel Core i7-9750H 2.6 GHz;
- 32 GB DDR4 RAM;
- ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 2070 MINI;
- Windows 10 Home.
The device was tested in Crystal Disk Mark, Crystal Disk Info, AS SSD, AIDA64 and Anvil’s Storage Utilities applications. Naturally, the performance was at the level expected for PCIe Gen3 mode. So, in Crystal Disk Mark the drive demonstrated 3001 MB / s for reading and 2994 MB / s for writing.
Copying a 108GB video folder from another NVMe SSD to the WD Black SN850 took about 1 minute and 15 seconds. Copying took place at an average speed of 1.4 GB / s. At the same time, the disk temperature rose to 61 degrees. For this series, this kind of heating is common, and when using a radiator, the situation should improve. However, not under load, the SSD keeps temperatures below 50 degrees.
Next, we decided to test the WD Black SN850 in games, and installed Cyberpunk 2077 on it. When installed, the average temperature was kept at around 44 degrees, and the maximum was fixed at 52 degrees. We ran Cyberpunk 2077 on impressive graphics settings without tracing.
It took just 7 seconds to start a new game before loading the Prologue “Child of the Streets”. It took the same amount of time to start the save from the menu and boot into the Little China area. The fast travel from Bar El Coyoto Coho in the Glen to Offshore Street in Northside took 15 seconds.
TOTAL
The WD Black SN850 is a fast SSD that’s perfect for those who could afford to build a new PCIe Gen4 x4 system last or this year when prices for many components skyrocketed. Unfortunately, we are not among them yet. In addition, it may come in handy in the future for those who want to expand the memory of the PlayStation 5, when it is already using the compartment allocated for this. For most users with older systems, this drive is likely to be redundant – it is worth looking at more affordable models that do not require new interfaces and demonstrate excellent performance within their generation.
Author: Sergey Dyakonenko (Madnfs)
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