WD Black SN850X Gen4 NVMe SSD Review

for the last two years the WD black sn850 was at the top of my recommendation list for anyone that was looking for a high performance Gen 4 SSD because it has been one of the fastest drives on the market and it usually had a really good price but then this new WD black sn850x came out and this new version is supposed to replace the old one completely it should cost exactly the same it is supposed to be even faster and it also comes with a game mode 2.0 feature that is supposed to speed up the game loading times even more unfortunately Samsung just launched their 990 Pro that I reviewed already and this drive totally raised the bar when it comes to Performance so let's see how this new WD black sn850x compares to it and which one should you go for let's go this video is brought to you by seasonic and their Prime TX power supplies these fully modular high quality power supplies are extremely efficient they are very quiet due to their new hybrid fan control that stops the fans completely under 40 load they offer a variety of connections for any kind of systems you have in mind and you even get the new 12 volt high power connection you need for the brand new RTX 490 graphics cards from Nvidia they range from 650 Watts all the way up to 1600 Watts for the biggest enthusiasts out there and as a nice bonus you get a cozy 12 year long warranty check them out using the links in the description below just like its predecessor the sn850x is a high-end SSD and it also comes with all the bells and whistles you would expect to see on a high-end drive it is a TLC drive it has dram cache and it has SLC caching though the specs on their own website are a bit vague and I kind of did expect more transparency for a brand that is this large they do offer a five year long warranty but there is no mention of Hardware encryption anywhere so keep that in mind if that is important to you when it comes to capacity they dropped the 500 gigabyte version and you can choose between a one two or four terabyte models and this completely makes sense in my opinion because as I've said before ssds have become quite cheap and anything that is under a one terabyte just has a very poor price to capacity ratio and it's just not worth getting the one and two terabyte models can be bought either with or without a heatsink and the four terabyte model is only sold without a heatsink I'll talk about thermal performance a bit later but do keep in mind that every Gen 4 SSD gets hot and you should put it under some kind of a heatsink this goes for both pcus and PlayStation 5 use anyway I have a one terabyte model here with a heatsink and as you can see it is pretty much the same as they used on the sn850 and the non-hitsync versions just have a simple black sticker instead and if we just look at the specs the sn850x looks like a small improvement from the sn850 but as always specs usually mean very little so let's see how it actually performs instead I'm going to begin with the PC Mark 10 quick Benchmark which is a collection of little light tests that replicate all those little things we do with our PCS every single day and those are the things like working with various documents or photos for example so I always say this is a very useful Benchmark for anyone that wants to add a second SSD or an extra SSD to their system for those simple little tasks right the sn850 was already one of the fastest drives in this test and the sn850x is slightly faster one percent of a difference is not that much so it is still in the same ballpark as the sn850 and the KC 3000 as well as the Corsair MP be 600 bro but that does put it ahead of some budget-focused drives like The crucial P5 plus and the S70 blade it is also behind the cheaper WD black sn770 but that is a dram-less drive that uses a host memory buffer feature instead which means that it is a lot faster on this I9 ddr5 system that I'm testing on than it would be on a mid-range system and there's also an even bigger Gap with a 990 Pro which is right now in a class of itself the full PC Mark 10 is the test that is a bit more intense and is supposed to replicate a more constant more serious and more intense use of your system and of your drive so this is a great Benchmark for anyone that is looking for a new main drive or for anyone that needs to run some applications that are heavy on the SSD and here the sn850x shows a much bigger improvement over the old sn850 10 of the difference is a nice step up and it is enough to overtake the competing KC 3000 as well as the mp600 pro drives it's also looking good compared to the crucial P5 plus and the older 980 Pro but again the 1990 Pro is ahead of it by about 10 and when we look at the latency there is a significant improvement over the sn850 as well which is enough for it to take the second spot behind the Samsung the pcmr consistency test is not really relevant to most of you because it simulates an extreme multi-hour workload that stresses the drive to its limits and this just doesn't happen in most regular use cases but for a high-end drive like this one it is good to see how it holds up when stressed for this much and for this long and here the sn850x shows a small Improvement over the sn850 again this test is really not for everyone but if this somehow matters to you there are clearly better options out there now unlike the previous test this one does slightly benefit from having a larger capacity and there have been a lot of questions about different capacities and how they actually affect the performance of an SSD so I'm actually preparing a very nice video on that topic as well anyway what I do expect more people to care about is gaming workloads and I think that this is where the new Western Digital black sn850x really shines in the full 3dmark storage Suite which includes a lot of gaming related tasks like loading games like installing games like recording and saving games as well as moving game folders this drive sets a new record of 772 megabytes per second average which is some comfortably ahead of every other SSD on this list the latency results showed a similar picture with the sn850x being ahead of everything else by a comfortable margin including the new 990 Pro from Samsung now in this graph I've scored every SSD based on their performance in the tests that I believe are the most relevant to the majority of Gamers so which SSD loads your game the fastest and which will install and update your games the quickest without those secondary tasks like recording that are not so important to everyone and this puts the sn850x again in the first place which is about 10 ahead of the 990 Pro West digital is advertising a feature called gaming mode 2.0 which is supposed to improve a game caching and loading even further so I installed the WD dashboard which is actually pretty useful so you can check for firmware updates here and you can make sure that your SSD is connected at the correct speed so pcie Express gen 4x4 in this case it also lets you change the little LED on the top of the heatsink although in my opinion this is not really enough to call this an RGB feature anyway I went on and switched the game mode 2.0 on I rebooted a PC and ran every gaming Benchmark three more times to see if game loading times improved but they actually didn't the results even average slightly below the first three runs without the game mode on now maybe it's going to be working better in other scenarios but from our testing right now it doesn't seem to be something you want or you need to turn on or at least not yet maybe they will improve it in the future sequential read and write performance doesn't really represent a proper real life use as well as previous tests too in sequential rights the sn850x shows a small performance increase over the old model even if it's just below some of the top drives in the list and in sequential reads the sn850 actually shows a small performance decrease compared to the sn850 keeping it in that same subtop category again I really don't think that these sequential results really matter especially since those read speeds are still way higher than what Sony recommends you need for your PlayStation 5 which is about 5500 megabytes per second and whether you're putting this in a PlayStation 5 or in a PC you definitely need to think about cooling so testing with the heatsink version the SSD sensor hits temperatures around the 80 degrees Celsius during a stress test with the heat camera on the heatsink reporting around 58 degrees now this is completely fine especially since most use cases don't really stress this drive nearly as much and if you have even a little bit of a case airflow it will stay much cooler than this but this also means that without a heatsink it can definitely overheat and it will start throttling which means that the performance will go down many motherboards come with heat sinks nowadays and these will be just fine but if yours doesn't have one for some reason you can just buy a third-party heatsink online they cost about 10 or Euros on Amazon and as always I will leave a few suggestions in the description of this video so keep in mind if the model with a heatsink is much more expensive than the non-hitsync version in your region I would just grab a cheaper third-party heatsink instead and save up a bit and talking about the price the sn850x is supposed to replace the sn850 completely and in some places like here in the Netherlands there is already visible the sna 50x right now costs 137 Euros for one terab byte and the older sn850 is already more expensive so the sn850x obviously makes more sense 137 Euros is also close to what you would usually pay for the sn850 before and I do assume that it will still drop a bit over time in the US however it is a bit different right now so the older sn850 is on sale for around 105 dollars while this new sn850x costs 135 dollars the sn850x is a better drive but it is very tempting to just save 30 dollars and still get an excellent SSD so as always just check all the prices in your region before you buy it to decide if this SSD makes sense to you still I think WD has done a great job with the sn850x it performs better than the sn850 and it just does really well in every test that actually matters and then especially so in gaming related tasks and when you hear about gaming ssds it usually means just marketing stuff but this drive actually shows a bigger benefit in gaming benchmarks which is really refreshing to see and if you're looking for a drive to mainly use for gaming this is definitely a drive to keep an eye on now thank you so much for watching this video I really hope it was helpful if you liked it please do consider subscribing to my channel to never miss my future uploads bye y'all and see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Techtesters

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Id: t5yC1PlhHJE

Length: 13min 2sec (782 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2022