WD_BLACK SN850X 4TB M.2 2280 Game Drive PCIe Gen4 NVMe up to 7300 MB/s

Product Information

Running on the same basic interface as your graphics card, NVMe SSDs deliver more raw bandwidth and performance than any SATA-based SSD could ever offer. They're also a lot smaller than any other hard drive or SSD too, which all means that the best NVMe SSDs are perfect for either that small form factor build you always wanted or a monstrous high-end gaming PC build. What PCIe generation should I look for? Crucial's T700 is the world's fastest SSD, taking the hands-down performance lead in every performance category. That groundbreaking speed comes courtesy of the drive's PCIe 5.0 x4 connection, which offers a pathway for up to twice the throughput of PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and the Phison E26 SSD controller paired with Micron's leading-edge 232-Layer 3D TLC flash. That potent common creates an SSD that's the fastest on the market for PC game loading times.

Intel is a known brand, and their SSDs are generally reliable, with a strong warranty and good support. However, this drive now falls under the Solidigm umbrella and has been succeeded by the PCIe 4.0 P41 Plus. That drive is DRAM-less and feels more like a side-grade, but has also been priced aggressively. However, if you don’t need the bit of extra bandwidth and would prefer a drive with DRAM, the 670p is a solid choice for a budget PCIe 3.0 SSD, especially for laptops. It's in the real-world tests where the SN770 really struts its stuff. You'd be hard-pushed to tell the difference between this drive and much faster offerings in most day-to-day operations. Given this is the cheaper drive right now, that counts for a lot. The SN850 is the better drive if you need better performance, but you will pay considerably more. The Intel 670p is an older driver, but it is also a proven budget option that is often on steep sale. It’s best to grab it at 1TB or 2TB, as the 512GB model is slower with a smaller pSLC cache. The drive has DRAM, which is nice, and it has the fastest QLC on the market, even now. Performance outside of the cache does not suffer as much as a consequence.Silicon Power is a brand that probably doesn’t get much attention compared to the likes of Samsung or WD, but when you look at its XS70 NVMe SSD with its high-end specifications, it's clear that the brand name isn't everything. Armed with the latest Phison controller and high-performance NAND flash memory, a drive like the Silicon Power XS70 should have no problem competing with thebest SSD on the market. Early examples of the latest generation of M.2 drives, using the PCI Express 5.0 bus, also come in the Type-2280 format, but it's expected that some PCIe 5.0 slots on new motherboards will be built to support the larger Type-25110 format (25mm by 110mm), so we may well see PCIe 5.0 SSDs with these dimensions as well. PCIe 5 drives are capable of tremendous throughput speeds (in excess of 10,000MBps) that should generate abundant heat, and the SSDs we have seen so far come with substantial built-in heatsinks. The NVMe, or Non-Volatile Memory Express interface, has been designed specifically with solid state drives in mind. In contrast, SATA, the previous interface in charge, was built to cater to most HDDs. The thought is, at the time, that no storage would ever need to exceed its lofty max bandwidth. To the surprise of a few, new storage mediums such as solid state absolutely blaze past SATA's max bandwidth, and so a new protocol in NVMe was born.

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.Smaller-capacity 32GB and 64GB M.2 SSDs are also available for use in embedded applications or for SSD caching, but these are of marginal interest to upgraders or PC builders. Pricing on these drives ranges anywhere from 10 to 75 cents per gigabyte, and the biggest factor affecting price is the bus type of the drive. We have tested both the original version of this drive, which had a heatsink and 96-layer flash, as well as the updated Gaming version which has a heatsink and 176-layer flash. Inland also has updated this model with that flash and now offers a 4TB capacity option, sans heatsink for all capacities. We do recommend a heatsink for heavier workloads, which can be added yourself if you don’t fancy the Gaming model of Inland’s line or need a 4TB option.

If you're copying a game from one drive to another or validating game files in Steam, faster NVMe drives make a difference. They can also shave off a second or two when it comes time to load a game level, but the more significant difference is against hard drives, where even a slower SATA SSD is much faster. Go beyond a certain point, and all SSDs start to feel similar. M.2 drive length isn't always an indicator of drive capacity, but therearelimits to NAND-chip density and how many memory modules engineers can stuff onto a PCB of a given size. As a result, most of the M.2 drives we've seen to date have topped out at 2TB, though you can find a few 4TB and 8TB models at lofty prices. The typical capacity waypoints are as follows: In need of a lot more storage capacity? Look no further than the Lexar NM790. Available with up to four terabytes of storage, there's really no need to worry about your burgeoning Steam library any longer with one of these installed in your PC. WD's NAND technology still lags behind its competitors, with its 112-Layer BiCS5 flash competing against 176-Layer flash from Micron and SK hynix. However, this has advantages, as WD's mature flash can be carefully and reliably binned. BiCS5 also has 1Tb dies available for higher-capacity SSDs. This isn't a slow SSD, either. It's right up there with the very best PCIe Gen4 drives today at 7,400MB/s read and 6,500MB/s write. In our own testing, we measured it at 7,106MB/s seq. read and 6,504MB/s seq. Write—very nearly bang on what's advertised, which is really great.The same goes for PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 drives. You're just wasting the potential of the higher-speed drive by dropping it into a slower slot, is all, but it will work. What PCIe generation should I look for? The XS70 is designed with PS5 compatibility in mind so the heatsink isn’t as bulky as some others you might come across. It really does look good. Admittedly I'm talking about an SSD here, and its not the kind of thing you'll spend time looking at, but Silicon Power's designers deserve credit. The Samsung SSD 990 Pro, the company's flagship PCI Express 4.0 NVMe internal solid-state drive, has a hard act to follow in the Editors' Choice-winning SSD 980 Pro, but for the most part it makes a great product even better. This power-efficient drive gets high marks for raw speed, everyday application performance, a strong software suite, and hardware-based encryption. The heatsink-equipped version of this drive performed slightly better than the non-heatsink version (which we tested using our testbed's motherboard's heatsink) in most of our benchmarks. It doesn't quite merit the 980 Pro's Editors' Choice award, because other recent internal SSDs have outpaced it in our gaming benchmarks, but its overall capability makes this Samsung a versatile drive well-suited for creative tasks. Who It's For

The Lexar does differ from many others we've looked at. We've come to expect higher-end Gen4 drives to rely on Phison's very popular E18 controller, but the Lexar doesn't. It uses a MaxioTech MAP1602A controller, a less known quantity in the US and EU markets. This makes for overtly different behaviour in testing to more common controllers, but not in a bad way. The AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) command protocol was designed for much slower media (i.e., spinning magnetic disks). AHCI is inefficient with modern SSDs, so a new standard was developed: NVMHCI (Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface). Combine NVMHCI with a fast PCIe interface, and you have NVMe, Non-Volatile Memory Express. It's a much-improved interface developed around the needs of flash memory rather than spinning disks. What's NVMe performance like in the real world? In my early career, I worked as an editor of scholarly science books, and as an editor of "Dummies"-style computer guidebooks for Brady Books (now, BradyGames). I'm a lifetime New Yorker, a graduate of New York University's journalism program, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. That's not a bad thing. Especially in the case of laptops, an older machine might supportonlyM.2 SATA-bus SSDs, and that will be the boundary of your upgrade path...end of story. As a result, the only reasons you'd upgrade the drive, in that situation, would be to get more capacity, or if the old one failed.The Team MP44 is part of the vanguard for new and better DRAM-less SSDs. Newer controllers and flash are letting budget/value drives push the limits of the PCIe 4.0 interface while providing high capacities without making compromises. They can have the endurance and performance of TLC and the high power efficiency of four-channel, DRAM-less controllers, all without extra cost. Less power means less heat, and these drives are also designed to be single-sided. That combination makes the MP44 perfect for laptops. All of this leaves the minor matter of how this drive actually performs. When it comes to peak sequential throughput, the Platinum P41 is basically as fast as anything else out there, bar a few rounding errors. OK, the Samsung 990 Pro is a bit faster at 7,462MB/s for reads to the P41's 7,375MB/s. But, honestly, it's inconsequential. The same goes for writes, where almost all the top drives will do just under 6.9GB/s. Welcome to the cutting edge! You're shopping for a kind of drive that many folks don't even realize exists. As a result, you need to pay attention to several factors that may not be documented very well while you shop. Let's recap. It improves game loading times courtesy of a so-called "read look-ahead" algorithm, which predictively caches game data.