WD Black SN850X PCIe 4.0 drive review: What a gaming SSD should be

The most popular high-performance SSDs for consumer PCs, the Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN850, were released about two years ago.
They are still in high demand, but frankly, they are no longer the best and fastest PCIe 4.0 drives today.
The situation was fundamentally changed by the advent of Micron B47R 176-layer TLC memory, which allowed other SSD developers to release not only comparable speeds, but even faster models.
The Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN850 were mainly drives based on the Phison E18 controller.
There are countless manufacturers of various calibers, and this, of course, could not go unanswered by the market leaders for long.
Both Samsung and Western Digital have chosen this fall to update their flagship SSD models and try to return their products to the leading position in the ranks of the best SSDs for high-performance gaming and work systems.
So, Samsung introduced the 990 Pro on a new Pascal chip and 176-layer proprietary memory, while Western Digital released the Black SN850X with more advanced BiCS5 memory and an improved proprietary controller.
Both models promise better performance than their predecessors, but they differ slightly in the way manufacturers present them.
If for 990 Pro the Samsung company promises \"incredible speed and endless victories\" always and in everything, the novelty Western Digital is described as a primarily gamer product with \"dizzying speed in games\" and a special Game Mode 2.0.Naturally, the laboratory 3DNews can not leave such ambitious claims without practical testing.
And first for the detailed analysis we have received the new WD Black SN850X - this drive is already available in local stores.⇡#Appearance and internal designWD Black SN850X is a drive, clearly aimed at the audience of gamers.
Therefore, it will hardly be a surprise to anyone that it is equipped with a heatsink with configurable RGB backlighting.
However, for those users who prefer SSD cooling systems available on modern motherboards, Black SN850X versions without a radiator are also available.
They are, by the way, as much as $20 cheaper.
That's why, choosing a version of the drive for a detailed acquaintance, we settled on the radiatorless terabyte.
Such storage has the recommended price of $135, and in Russia you can buy it for about 13 thousand rubles (naturally, we mean the parallel imports).
The \"bare\" WD Black SN850X will hardly surprise anybody with its appearance.
It is a single-sided M.2 2280 board with a simple sticker carrying a usual set of information: title, capacity, serial number, PSID to reset the encryption and so on.
Of interest on the label is the date of manufacture of the drive.
Our copy, for example, was released in July.
Without the label WD Black SN850X is very similar to its predecessor, Black SN850.
The PCB design of the old and new models is almost exactly the same.
Similar (but not identical) are also the sizes and markings of the chips installed on the board.
But the difference between the drives is significant, it becomes clear with a closer look.First, the new Black SN850X uses an upgraded controller: in fact we are talking about a version 2.0 proprietary eight-channel chip designed by engineers SanDisk, which was used in the Black SN850.
His new version has received support for faster types of flash memory, plus those exclusive gamer optimization and Game Mode 2.0, the presence of which the novelty is so carefully emphasized Western Digital.
Secondly, the flash memory itself has changed.
The Black SN850 was based on 96-layer BiCS4 (TLC 3D NAND), then the new drive moved to BiCS5 with 112 layers.
We have already had an opportunity to see how fast BiCS5 is on the example of WD Black SN770, because thanks to it four-channel bufferless SSD was unreachable leader in its class.
However, when using BiCS5 in the eight-channel Black SN850X there was an unpleasant nuance.
This memory has an increased to 512 Gbit capacity kernels, so in a terabyte SSD decreased the degree of parallelism - the controller can only use the double interleaving of devices in the channels.
However, the Western Digital developers believe that this is more than compensated by the accelerated to 1.2 GHz interface and a 50% reduction of latency BiCS5.
And the specifications of the new model as if to confirm the absence of the negative effect of changing the memory in a terabyte: even at this capacity new SSD promises 5-20% higher linear speeds compared to the previous model.As for the last component Black SN850X, buffer DRAM, then she, in fact, no change