WD_BLACK SN8100: Dealers Reveal Western Digital’s Flagship SSD 14 comments
Once again, the retail industry has moved faster, unveiling Western Digital’s new flagship SSD before the manufacturer officially announced its market launch. The WD_BLACK SN8100 operates at up to 14.9 GB/s, close to the practical limit of PCIe 5.0 x4. Apparently, the controller isn’t from its own company.
First, the WD_BLACK SN8100 was discovered by the mail-order company Amazon. The article page for the M.2 SSD has long since been offline, but the screenshots show the description of the 4 TB model (WDS400T1XHM), which is expected to read at up to 14,900 MB/s and write at up to 14,000 MB/s. The 2 TB model should also achieve over 2.3 million IOPs. Only the 1 TB version described was also slightly slower, with 11,000 MB/s write and 1.6 million IOPs.
The performance figures are close to those of the Samsung 9100 Pro (test), which is specified at 14,800/13,400 MB/s sequential read/write and up to 2.6 million IOPs. However, the values are even more consistent with new models such as the Kingston Fury Renegade G5, which was unveiled with 14,800/14,000 MB/s and up to 2.2 million IOPS.
While the product pages that have now appeared at various dealerships in Europe do not feature the WD_BLACK SN8100, the new flagship will also use the SM2508 controller, as used in the aforementioned Kingston model, as well as the recently unveiled MarS-980 series from Adata or the Lexar NM1090 Pro.
It also agrees that the WD_BLACK SN8100 only requires 7 watts on average. The SM2508 controller manufactured in the 6nm process should achieve high performance much more efficiently than is the case with the older SSD with an E26 (12nm) controller from Phison.
The use of the controller from Silicon Motion would nevertheless be a surprise, because a separate controller from Western Digital or rather Sandisk has always been used for previous flagships such as the WD_BLACK SN850X (test). Additionally, the company had a PCIe 5.0 SSD with 15 GB/s and 2 million PIO at less than 7 Watts last summer, which would have a self-developed controller.
Potential WD_BLACK SSD with PCIe 5.0 and 15 GB/s at just 6.5 watts (image: Anandtech)
It now remains to be seen whether this was a misunderstanding, earlier plans were rejected, or information on retailers’ front product pages. In addition, it needs to be shown whether the WD_BLACK brand is truly continuous, because Western Digital’s SSD division is now on the road as SanDisk. And Sandisk had promised a PCIe 5.0 SSD for this year.
The new Sandisk SSDs with BICS8 are to be delivered from Q2 2025 (Fig.: Sandisk): Flash-Speicher M.2 NVME PCIE 5.0 SSD Storage Western Digital
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