WD has just announced a new version of its popular PCIe 4 SSD, making it one of the cheapest yet fastest 8TB M.2 SSDs around. The new 8TB WD Black SN850X is still a pricey option, but could save you as much as $220 compared to some other 8TB drives.
The 2TB version of this WD drive has the top spot on our best gaming SSD guide, thanks to its great balance of performance and value. However, for most gamers, we wouldn’t recommend paying so much money for the 8TB version, especially when most motherboards these days can accommodate two or even three M.2 SSDs.
Nonetheless, if you’re in the market for one single massive SSD, the 8TB WD Black SN850X looks like a solid candidate as its PCIe 4 interface and TLC NAND combine to provide a nippy 7,200MB/s sequential read speed, along with 6,600MB/s sequential write speed. The drive also delivers a capable 1,200K IOPs random read and write speed. Those aren’t chart-topping numbers, but they represent a solid step up over older PCIe 3 drives.
This massive capacity understandably comes with a very high write endurance of 4,800 terabytes written (TBW), which means you can completely fill and wipe the drive 600 times before the NAND storage will degrade. It only comes with a five-year warranty, which is typical for SSDs, but at this price and high capacity, some extra warranty coverage would sweeten the deal.
The drive is available in versions with and without a heatsink, with the heatsink adding a surprisingly high cost of £55 to its UK MSRP. We don’t have exact numbers for the extra cost in USD, but the non-heatsink version is priced at $849. Clearly that’s a lot of money, but most other bigger brand options are noticeably more expensive. The Sabrent Rocket 8TB costs $1,069, for example, while the 8TB Corsair MP600 Pro is $941. Only the likes of Teamgroup and XPG offer similarly-priced drives.
Meanwhile, for a much more sensibly-priced option, any of the other SN850X options make for excellent choices, with the 2TB option featured in our SN850X review being an ideal drive for anyone seeking an affordable boot/gaming drive.