Western Digital Provides 8TB Mannequin to Common Excessive-Finish SN850X SSD Drive Household

Western Digital has quietly launched an 8 TB model of its high-end SN850X SSD, doubling the highest capability of the well-regarded drive household. The brand new drive provides efficiency on par with different members of the vary, however with twice as a lot capability because the earlier top-end mannequin – and with a large value premium to go together with its newfound capability.

Western Digital introduced its WD_Black SN850X SSDs in the summer of 2022, releasing single-sided 1 TB and a couple of TB fashions, together with a double-sided 4 TB mannequin. However now nearly two years down the road, the corporate has seen it match to introduce the even increased capability 8 TB mannequin to function their flagship PCIe 4.0 SSD, and maintain with the instances of NAND costs and SSD capability calls for.

Like the opposite SN850X fashions, WD is utilizing their in-house, 4-channel controller for the brand new 8 TB mannequin, which sports activities a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. And being that it is a high-end SSD, the controller is paired with DRAM (DDR4) for web page index caching, although WD does not disclose how a lot DRAM is on any given mannequin. On the NAND entrance, WD is outwardly nonetheless utilizing their BiCS 5 112L NAND right here, which implies we’re 4x 2 TB NAND chips, every with 16 1Tbit TLC dies on-board, twice as many dies as have been used on the NAND chips for the 4 TB mannequin.

The height learn velocity of the brand new 8TB mannequin is 7,200 MB/sec, which is definitely a smidge under the efficiency the 4 TB and a couple of TB fashions as a result of overhead from the extra NAND dies. In the meantime peak sequential write speeds stay at 6,600 MB/sec, whereas 4K random write efficiency maxes out at 1200K IOPS for each reads and writes. It goes with out saying that it is a step under the efficiency of the market flagship PCIe 5.0 SSDs accessible as we speak, however it should be a bit longer till anybody else in addition to Phison is transport a PCIe 5.0 controller – by no means thoughts the truth that these drives aren’t accessible in 8 TB capacities.

The 8 TB SN850X additionally retains the identical drive endurance development as the remainder of the SN850X household. On this case, double the NAND brings double the endurance of the 4 TB mannequin, for an total endurance of 4800 terabytes written (TBW). Or by way of drive writes per day, this is similar 0.33 score as the opposite SN850X drives.

Western Digital’s WD_Black SN850X is accessible each with and with out aluminum heatsink. The model with no heatsink geared toward laptops and BYOC setups prices $849.99, whereas a model with an aluminum warmth spreader comes at $899.99. In each instances the 8 TB drive carries a major value premium over the prevailing 4 TB mannequin, which is available for $259.99.

This type of value premium is sadly typical for 8 TB drives, and can doubtless stay so till each provide and demand for the high-capacity drives picks as much as carry costs down. Nonetheless, with rival drives reminiscent of Corsair’s MP600 Professional XT 8 TB and Sabrent’s Rocket 4 Plus 8 TB going for $965.99 and $1,199.90 respectively, the introduction of the 8 TB SN850X is unquestionably pushing high-capacity M.2 SSD costs down, albeit slowly. So for methods with a number of M.2 slots, at the very least, the candy spot on drive pricing remains to be to get two 4 TB SSDs.