WD Black SN850X 8 TB NVMe SSD review

pcgamer.com:

That's eight terabytes of storage on a single PCIe SSD. Seriously. We've come a long way since the conception of M.2 solid state storage, haven't we? This beautiful, sleek little number from Western Digital pushes the limits of what's currently possible with just how much storage you can get on a single stick. It's nothing if not an engineering marvel. But it does create some pretty potent questions in its wake. Not only from your stereotypical hardware review perspective, but also from a use-case angle as well. Simply put, who is this for? How can you justify 8 TB of storage in the modern era of wildly rapid internet speeds and almost seamless cloud storage solutions?

WD's SN850X SSDs aren't exactly new in the field either. We reviewed WD's SN850X line when it first debuted to the world back in October of 2022. But at last, Joe Public has finally been gifted with an 8 TB update from the company. Complete with a revised controller, far denser NAND, and a seriously large price tag.

For core tech, the 8 TB variant is running a proprietary Sandisk controller built off the back of its Triton MP16+ B2 platform (the same one found in the original line-up). It's combined that with Kioxia's 162-layer BiCS6 TLC NAND, fed into four separate packages on the stick. That's then backed up by a healthy slab of DDR4 to keep everything nicely chundling along, and of course it all comes packaged in that ever faithful M.2 2280 form factor (albeit it is double-sided) complete with a heatsink option if you need it.

As for cost, well, since the 8 TB's initial launch, WD has rather intuitively hit it on the head with a pretty big price cut hammer. You can now pick one of these up for around $650 in the US (it did debut at $850). That's a smart move, given two 4 TB WD SN850Xs will set you back just $600 total. WD basically has a balancing act to do with this thing. It needs to simultaneously keep the stock flowing on the older units without compromising the sales on its new launch. Expect