Western Digital Adds 8TB Model to Popular High-End SN850X SSD Drive Family

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 launched its WD_Black SN850X SSDs in the summertime of 2022, releasing single-sided 1 TB and a pair of TB fashions, together with a double-sided 4 TB mannequin. However now virtually 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 this can be a high-end SSD, the controller is paired with DRAM (DDR4) for web page index caching, although WD would not disclose how a lot DRAM is on any given mannequin. On the NAND entrance, WD is seemingly nonetheless utilizing their BiCS 5 112L NAND right here, which suggests we’re taking a look at 4x 2 TB NAND chips, every with 16 1Tbit TLC dies on-board, twice as many dies as had been used on the NAND chips for the 4 TB mannequin.

The height learn pace of the brand new 8TB mannequin is 7,200 MB/sec, which is definitely a smidge under the efficiency the 4 TB and a pair 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 this can be a step under the efficiency of the market flagship PCIe 5.0 SSDs obtainable in the present day, however it may 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 obtainable 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 identical 0.33 ranking as the opposite SN850X drives.

Western Digital’s WD_Black SN850X is obtainable 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 present 4 TB mannequin, which is available for $259.99.

This sort of value premium is sadly typical for 8 TB drives, and can seemingly stay so till each provide and demand for the high-capacity drives picks as much as deliver 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 certainly 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 continues to be to get two 4 TB SSDs.