Many have asked for a long time when WD_Black is going to have a PCIe Gen5 drive. It’s here.

The motherboard of the PC we tried it with is Asus TUF x870-Plus Wi-Fi. It’s built for performance. Keeping it company is AMD Ryzen 9800X3D CPU, which is focused on gaming.

Sandisk’s WD_Black SN8100 NVMe PCIe Gen 5.0 SSD is being marketed as the fastest thing around, allowing up to 14,900 MB/s. Yes, the internal SSD drive reaches sequential read speeds up to 14,900MB/s and sequential write speeds up to 14,000MB/s. That’s a lot of speed. It allows you to achieve over 2M IOPS of random performance. Most drives in the market are getting close to two million but this one is at 2.3-2.4 million.

Many built PCs when the pandemic was in full swing. It was the time of PCIe Gen4 drive, which maxes out at around 8,000 MB/s. When you go from Gen4 to Gen5, the speed almost doubles. The theoretical limit is 16,000 MB/s. The SN8100 does 14,900 MB/s. You will notice the difference when loading a game.

In case you haven’t updated your PC in many years, this could be the right time to showcase your PC-building skills. SN8100 ensures your PC will perform at a top level for a long time.

What took the Gen5 model so much time? The company had to wait for the CPU to catch up. Power and thermals of the drive matter. The first Gen5 models drew a lot of power, generating a lot of heat, which takes a toll on the SSD. The SN8100 has managed to tackle all that and draws less power than its rivals, yet it offers more speed than those brands.

Sandisk doesn’t cut back anywhere, making it almost impossible to find a better all-around drive.

The Sandisk WD_Black SN8100 is single-sided at all of the launch capacities. It can be used in laptops and other devices that can’t fit some double-sided drives.

Sandisk is marketing the SN8100’s power efficiency as a way to simplify your system design without the need for expensive cooling. There is no thermal throttling, that is, the drive’s controller doesn’t slow down its performance to prevent any damage.

The device is also durable. It matches the Teamgroup Z540 and the Crucial P510. The total terabytes written (TBW) spec is a manufacturer’s estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail. The drive’s durability rating is very high and SN8100 should easily last the full warranty period and beyond.

In both Crystal DiskMark sequential read and write testing, the SN8100 almost matched the advertised speeds, making it the fastest SSD we have tested.

The WD_Black SN8100 is a top-tier performer, with the best overall benchmark results of any SSD we’ve tested and it manages to do so while minimising power consumption.

The WD_Black SN8100 NVMe SSD is available in 1TB (₹17,499), 2TB and 4TB capacity options. The WD_Black SN8100 NVMe with Heatsink will also be available this fall in 1TB (₹18,999), 2TB and 4TB capacities. An 8TB option is expected to be available later this year.