WD_BLACK SN850X 2TB M.2 2280 Game Drive with Heatsink PCIe Gen4 NVMe up to 7300 MB/s

Product Information

The SN850X is specced with PCIe Gen4 performance, quoting up to 7.3GB/s read and 6.6GB/s write in sequential transfer speeds for the 2TB and 4TB model. In random 4K performance, the higher-capacity models are expected to reach up to 1.2 million IOPS read and 1.2 million IOPS write.

The SN850's Gaming Mode worked by disabling lower power states, ensuring the drive would be more responsive. Game Mode 2.0 works differently with a three-pronged approach: predictive loading, adaptive thermal management, and overhead balancing. Predictive loading is an algorithm designed to detect upcoming low queue depth, sequential workloads - particularly the read workloads prevalent in many games. Adaptive thermal management works to improve average and sustained throughput via smoother throttling. Finally, overhead balancing seeks to improve read latency while gaming through I/O prioritization.

SN850X: Price UK

DirectStorage sure sounds as that there will be some improvement, albeit assuming you aren't running GPU at full load already, as DirectStorage apparently works mainly at the premise of taking some workload from the CPU and giving it to the GPU, such as to decompress files that get loaded in when walking to a new area in an open-world game. And for current-gen gaming, even slower NVMe SSDs sure are plenty fast. While we didn’t play around with the Game Mode app too much, these results indicate that results may vary depending on the application. Conclusion Today’s A-list titles can take up 200GB 2 or more of storage. A range of capacities from 1TB to 4TB 2 means you get to keep more games at the ready and get into the action fast.

Soup up your gaming experience with extremely low latency that loads graphics fast with minimal stutter and lagging for smooth, satisfying action. Of particular note is the Game Mode 2.0 feature that's new with the SN850X. The original Gaming Mode could be turned on or off within the Dashboard, but Game Mode 2.0 has an additional Auto setting to detect game launches. You can also manually enter game folder locations so the software knows where to watch. All of these tests leverage the common vdBench workload generator, with a scripting engine to automate and capture results over a large compute testing cluster. This allows us to repeat the same workloads across a wide range of storage devices, including flash arrays and individual storage devices. Our testing process for these benchmarks fills the entire drive surface with data, then partitions a drive section equal to 1% of the drive capacity to simulate how the drive might respond to application workloads. This is different than full entropy tests which use 100% of the drive and take them into a steady state. As a result, these figures will reflect higher-sustained write speeds.Considering it and its predecessor both employ the very same SanDisk 8-channel controller with the only difference being 256Gbit BiCS 4 vs. 512Gbit BiCS 5, we find this result to be powerful evidence that 512Gbit BiCS 5 flash is indeed faster than 256Gbit BiCS 4, but slightly slower than 176L hynix. PCM10 Storage Tests Extremely low latency loads graphics fast with minimal stutter and lagging for an incredibly smooth, satisfying gaming experience. The 1TB and 2TB drives have an optional version with RGB lighting plus heatsink to help maintain peak performance through the most intense gaming sessions. (Please choose the heatsink model for this) Moving onto sequential read 64K, the SN850X performed very well with 5.93GB/s (or 94,512 IOPS) with 337µs latency for second place. Again, this was an improvement over its predecessor, which posted a peak of 5.57GB/s (891K IOPS) at 354 µs.