Amazon now has the option to pre-order the yet-to-be-announced WD Black SN8100, which could be the fastest consumer SSD yet. The store’s stated read speed of 14.9 GB/s is nearly twice as fast as popular PCIe 4.0 solutions and beats flagship offerings from Samsung and Kingston.
Source: momomo_us
The SN8100 will be manufactured by Sandisk, which, as a reminder, recently separated from Western Digital. Despite the change of ownership, the WD Black brand will remain, and users are unlikely to notice the difference. Sandisk will undertake the production, promotion and support of the drive, but it will be sold under the familiar WD brand.
The WD Black SN8100 will be the first PCIe 5.0 SSD in the lineup and the successor to the SN850X, one of the leaders among PCIe 4.0 drives. The declared 14.9 GB/s read and 14 GB/s write performance exceeds the PCIe 5.0 competitors from Samsung, Kingston, and Crucial. In random operations tests (2.3 million IOPS), it is second only to the Samsung 9100 Pro with its proprietary Presto controller.
Pre-orders are currently available on Amazon (Germany) for the 1TB version only, priced at €199 (£18,656), which is 3-4 times more expensive than a PCIe 4.0 SSD. Shipments are expected on May 30, and Sandisk should officially unveil the drive by then.