UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. We consider it superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs on the actual game itself. This test is in fact the same as running the actual game, just without the inconsistencies inherent to application testing. This is a fairly noticeable increase compared to the 2020 SN850 model’s 7GB/s read and 5.3GB/s write in sequential and 1 million IOPS in 4K random performance. The SN850 also only offers up to 2TB in capacity, so the 4TB model is a nice addition to match the ever-growing game installation sizes. Starting with SQL average latency, the SN850X posted 3ms, which placed it in the upper part of the consumer NVMe SSD leaderboard. The 1TB and 2TB drives have an optional version with RGB lighting plus heatsink to help maintain peak performance through the most intense gaming sessions. (Please choose the heatsink model for this) The SN850X is specced with PCIe Gen4 performance, quoting up to 7.3GB/s read and 6.6GB/s write in sequential transfer speeds for the 2TB and 4TB model. In random 4K performance, the higher-capacity models are expected to reach up to 1.2 million IOPS read and 1.2 million IOPS write.

Of particular note is the Game Mode 2.0 feature that's new with the SN850X. The original Gaming Mode could be turned on or off within the Dashboard, but Game Mode 2.0 has an additional Auto setting to detect game launches. You can also manually enter game folder locations so the software knows where to watch.

The WD Black SN850X is one of the fastest drives around for gaming.

Get the ultimate gaming edge over your competition with insane speeds up to 7,300 MB/s for top-level performance and ridiculously short load times. Extremely low latency loads graphics fast with minimal stutter and lagging for an incredibly smooth, satisfying gaming experience. When it comes to benchmarking storage devices, application testing is best, and synthetic testing comes in second place. While not a perfect representation of actual workloads, synthetic tests do help to baseline storage devices with a repeatability factor that makes it easy to do apples-to-apples comparison between competing solutions. These workloads offer a range of different testing profiles ranging from “four corners” tests, common database transfer size tests, to trace captures from different VDI environments. In our SQL Server application test aimed at developers or homelab users, the SN850X showed a solid 3ms in latency, placing it near the top of the leaderboard of the other tested drives. While it wasn’t leaps and bounds better than its predecessor (the SN850), it did show noticeable improvements over a drive that is still considered a great-performance drive at almost 2 years old. Game Mode 2.0 also features an advanced “read look ahead” algorithm, which predicts and pre-emptively caches what is next in the game. WD indicates that this is done by allowing the SN850X’s controller to detect incoming low queue depth, sequential workloads, claiming that it will help speed up in-game loading of scenes, levels and other areas.

The 1TB model is quoted with slightly lower numbers in sequential writes with 6.3GB/s, while random reads are a bit lower as well with 800,000 IOPS. The endurance rating is 600 TBW (total bytes written) for the 1TB, 1,200 TBW (2TB) and 2,400 TBW (4TB) with an MTTF rating of 1.75 million hours.

Built for Gaming

The SN850X had weak random write performance, though it did display an improvement over its predecessor with a peak of 187K IOPS at a latency of 678.7µs (vs. 173K IOPS and 733.9µs for the SN850). To those that doubt the veracity of our assertion that BiCS 4 performs better than Micron B47R or Samsung V-NAND, we can and have demonstrated this on multiple occasions. Whenever everything is equivalent except the flash (same controller, same DRAM), good ole 96 Layer BiCS 4 arrayed SSDs easily outperform 176 Layer B47R arrayed SSDs. A good example is the M10P vs. S70 Blade or FX900 Pro. B47R is more prolific but has never outperformed BiCS, period - end of story. Half the layers, older and still the better performer; that's just how superior BiCS architecture has proven to be. And we don't even need to get into how much better BiCS 4 is than V-NAND because even B47R arrayed SSDs easily outperform Samsung's V-NAND arrayed 980 Pro.