SSD BENCHMARK FULL

The closest drives to this in terms of performance are the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus and the Samsung 980 Pro (opens in new tab). The SN850 builds on all of that to stand head and shoulders above the others to be the performance drive you want in your gaming PC. As we've said, the SN750 was a decent contender in terms of cost/performance for last-gen consideration too. The WD_Black AN1500 (opens in new tab)brought stunning performance to PCIe 3.0 platforms, while it's external next-gen SSDs (opens in new tab), like the P50, have done well in our testing too. Western Digital has been on an impressive run of late. When plenty of 'fast' SSDs still take 12 seconds to complete the same task, that proves what difference the latest technology can have on gaming performance. The fact that this performance is echoed in the Final Fantasy XIV benchmark, which has the SN850 loading the five different scenes in a shade under seven seconds for the first time, impresses no end.

SSD BENCHMARK FULL

With an overall throughput of nearly 495MB/s in the Quick test and 550MB/s in the Full benchmark, this is a drive that just keeps powering on in day to day use. It's the real-world performance tests that impress the most though, with PCMark 10's Quick and Full storage tests putting the SN850 way ahead of the field. The 4K write performance in AS SSD manage to flip this over as well, with the WD SN850 managing to outpace the Sabrent drive. Writes are lower than the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, but still healthy, at either side of 5GB/s. The synthetic benchmarks, spearheaded by ATTO and AS SSD, show that this is very much a second-generation PCIe 4.0 drive, with peak sequential read speeds knocking on 6,750MB/s and 5,920MB/s respectively.

Any SSD is ultimately defined by its performance, and as stated in the introduction, it's here that the WD SN850 really stands out from the crowd.

Ssd benchmark