WD Black SN850 1TB SSD Review

 
The drive arrives 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 7,000MB/s Sequential read figure is displayed in the bottom right corner of the box. Above this WD highlights the interface the drive uses and its capacity.

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. To the right of this panel is another image of the drive while to the left of it is that Sequential read figure again, along with the maximum random read IOPS figure. All this information is displayed in English and French. Also on the back of the box is an icon displaying the fact it is supported with a 5-year warranty.

The SN850 is built on a single-sided M.2 2280 format. Under the near full-length product sticker sits the WD Black G2 8-channel Gen 4 PCIe 4.0 controller, two packages of 96-layer BiCS4 3D TLC NAND and a 1GB DDR4 cache chip.

WD's SSD management utility goes by the name of Dashboard. Dashboard is pretty comprehensive and allows you to monitor drive status, performance, perform secure erases (currently only by making a bootable USB device), update firmware and monitor temperatures. It also includes a gaming mode which if enabled reduces latency by disabling the low power modes via the firmware.

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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