WD Black NVMe 1TB SSD Review

WD's Black label has always been reserved for high performance disks and it has to be said that the original Black PCIe drive was disappointing. There were many that thought it should have actually been released as a Blue label product.

Now WD has delivered a drive in the shape of the WD Black NVMe that not only casts aside the disappointment of the original drive, but has got the company a seat on the top table of high performance drives. It is certainly worthy of carrying the Black moniker.

The Black NVMe sees the introduction of WD's own in-house controller which now gives the company a vertically integrated SSD platform and allows them to join that very select group of SSD manufacturers that have all the major components of a drive under their own control. Having everything in-house allows for better quality control over individual components and, more importantly in a particularly cut-throat market, a firm hand on pricing.

WD's new controller is built on a 28nm process using a tri-core architecture. It uses the latest WD nCache 3.0 intelligent tiered caching technology to boost performance, and unlike its competitors' use of caching technology which uses flexible sizing of the SLC cache, WD's nCache 3.0 uses a SLC cache that is fixed in size which saves the hassle of converting blocks from SLC usage to TLC and vice versa.

The controller also features advanced layered LDPC (Low-Density Parity Check) error correction technology, although it doesn't support Full Disk Encryption or both Microsoft's eDrive and TCG Opal encryption technologies.

Regardless, WD is back with a bang with its WD Black NVMe, and although the pricing for the 1TB drive may seem high, it is pretty competitive when compared to most of the drives in this market segment. In terms of sequential read/write performance, it is the fastest consumer drive we've tested to date.

We found the 1TB WD Black NVMe drive available from Overclockers UK for £219.99 (inc VAT) HERE (updated April 2019)

Pros

• Performance.
• WD controller.
• Five year warranty.

Cons

• The 4K performance was a little disappointing in some of the tests.

KitGuru says: It's taken a while but finally we've got an NVMe M.2 drive worthy of carrying WD's Black label for high-performance drives… and then some.

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