Western Digital Black 3D NVMe Gaming SSD Breaks Free With Up To 3,400 MB/s Reads

The SSD family is available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities, and offers incredible performance across the board. The 250GB SKU offers sequential reads/writes of up to 3,000 MB/sec and 1,600 MB/sec respectively, and random read/write performance of up to 220,000/170,000 IOPs.

The 1TB SKU is the speed demon of the family, with sequential read/writes of 3,400 MB/sec and 2,800 MB/sec respectively. Random read/write performance of the SSD clocks in at up to 500,000 IOPS and 400,000 IOPS respectively. As you might expect, the 500GB SSD fits neatly in between the 250GB and 1TB SSDs with respect to performance.

You won't have to make many compromises when it comes to performance with this PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 SSD, and pricing is also very competitive. The 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB SSDs are priced at $119.99, $229.99 and $449.99 respectively and will be available by the end of the month according to Western Digital.

“With our new architecture and controller, the Western Digital Black SSD integrates our 3D NAND technology with the NVMe interface to enable new levels of performance," said Mark Grace, Western Digital SVP for the Devices Business Unit. "Whether it’s a new gaming rig or a video-editing workstation, our innovative NVMe drives will power many existing and future environments that enable data to thrive."

Earlier this week, Kingston announced its new A1000 PCIe NVMe SSD which promised to deliver twice the performance of SATA SSDs at "near SATA" pricing. That SSD, unlike the aforementioned WD Black 3D NVMe SSDs uses a PCIe Gen 3.0 x2 interface, and has sequential reads/writes of "only" 1,500 MB/sec and 1,000 MB/sec respectively.