WD Black NVMe 1TB SSD Review

The WD Black NVMe comes in a smallish box with a clear image of the drive on the front. WD is obviously keen to let you know that this is a fast drive, too, as the 3400MB/s read figure is displayed in the bottom left corner of the box. Next to this are three boxes displaying the capacity of the drive, the fact it uses 3D NAND and that it comes with a 5 year warranty.

The rear of the box has a small clear plastic panel through which part of the drive is visible, sitting in its protective plastic enclosure. The only other thing in the box is a Technical Support and Warranty Guide.

WD's Black NVMe is a single sided PCB design, so the rear of the drive is empty, with all the components covered by the product label on the top side.

The layout of the components is different from any other M.2 drive we've seen in the fact that WD have positioned the controller (labelled SanDisk 20-880007011) in the middle of the drive between the two NAND packages.

This 1TB drive uses two 512GB BiCS 3 64-layer TLC packages (labelled SanDisk 05560 512G). Sitting between one of these packages and the controller is a single SK hynix H5AN8G6NAFA 1024MB DDR4-2666 cache IC.

WD's SSD management software goes by the name of SSD Dashboard.  With it you can monitor drive status, performance, secure erase (currently only by making a bootable USB device), update firmware and monitor temperatures. There's no cloning tool integrated into the utility but you can download Acronis True Image WD Edition from the WD website.

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