SanDisk's Blistering WD_Black SN8100 SSDs Nearly Saturate The PCIe 5 x4 Bus
SanDisk is laying claim to the fastest PCIe Gen 5.0 solid state drives on the planet (in the consumer realm, presumably) with its new WD_Black SN8100 series, the same one that made an early appearance on Amazon ahead of the official launch. The announcement comes hot on the heels of Kingston unveiling its ferociously fast Fury Renegade G5 lineup.
As far as bragging rights go, however, SanDisk just pickpocketed them from Kingston with its WN_Black SN8100. Whereas Kingston's latest Fury models boast sequential read and write speeds of up to 14,800MBs/ and 14,000MB/s, respectively, the WD_Black SN8100 gets slightly closer to saturating the PCIe 5.0 x4 bus with read speeds rated for up to 14,900MB/s (and write speeds of up to 14,000MB/s).
We'll dive into the numbers in just a moment, but first a bit of quick housekeeping on the SanDisk / Western Digital relationship. Western Digital acquired SanDisk back in 2015 for $19 billion, reportedly having beat out Micron, which was also said to be interested in buying the flash storage maker. Then this past February, Western Digital decided to spin off its flash memory division as SanDisk, leaving WD to focus its efforts on mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs). Hence the WD_Black branding with an announcement coming by way of SanDisk.
Getting back to the rated performance figures, at 14,900MB/s (14.9GB/s) for sequential reads, SanDisk's new drives are not far from the fastest PCIe 5.0 x4 speeds possible. The theoretical maximum limit is right around 15,750MB/s (15.75GB/s). However, overhead and other factors make it impossible to go truly full throttle. Just as we saw (and continue to see) with PCIe 4.0 models, however, drive makers are attempting to get as close as possible to the performance ceiling.
Naturally, SanDisk is pushing its new WD_Black SN8100 as being a high-performance solution for a variety of buyers.
"Whether it’s for high-level gaming, professional content creation, or AI applications, high-performance users now have a PCIe Gen 5.0 storage solution that matches speed with power efficiency to help them build the ultimate gaming rig or best-in-class workstation, enabling them to play and create with next-level performance and reliability," said Eric Spanneut, vice president of devices for Sandisk. “The WD_Black SN8100 NVMe SSD with PCIe Gen 5.0 delivers peak storage performance for the most discerning users."
The drives pair SanDisk's BiCS8 triple-level cell (TLC) 3D CMOS Directly Bonded to Array (CBA) NAND flash memory to an unspecified controller to raise the performance bar. As is often the case, higher capacities yield the best performance figures. In this case, it breaks down like this...
- 4TB: 14,900MB/s seq reads, 14,000MB/s seq writes, 2.3M IOPS random reads, 2.4M IOPS random writes
- 2TB: 14,900MB/s seq reads, 14,000MB/s seq writes, 2.3M IOPS random reads, 2.4M IOPS random writes
- 1TB: 14,900MB/s seq reads, 11,000MB/s seq writes, 1.6M IOPS random reads, 2.4M IOPS random writes
SanDisk also says it will be offering an 8TB model sometime later this year, but specs and pricing for the high-capacity variant have not yet been disclosed.
In the meantime, the above capacities are all available now without a heatsink. Here's how pricing looks like on Amazon...
- 4TB SanDisk WD_Black SN8100: $549.99
- 2TB SanDisk WD_Black SN8100: $279.99
- 1TB SanDisk WD_Black SN8100: $179.99
SanDisk is also offering the WD_Black SN8100 with a heatsink, though they're not yet available to purchase on Amazon or on SanDisk's own webstore.
