Sandisk WD Blue SN5100 NVMe SSD review

It’s been a year since I first reviewed the (now Sandisk) WD Blue SN5000, and boy, what a year it has been. At that time, this drive did not have many applications. It was heated. It was tardy. It was beaten to the punch by cheaper options, and thanks to the utilize of aging QLC NAND flash memory, it didn’t quite deliver on its promises the way it should have. Fortunately, the brand that offers the recent Sandisk WD Blue SN5100, which I have here for review, addresses virtually every one of my initial complaints.

From the newer, improved controller to the much more advanced (though still QLC) NAND flash package with higher density and better overall performance, it makes a damn good case for being one of the best SSDs you can buy, at least if the price is right. So much so that it enjoys a handsome 21% score raise compared to the OG SSD.

Interestingly, Sandisk isn’t throwing the SN5100 at gamers. He sees it primarily as a creator’s drive. An SSD designed for people looking for affordable storage where they can store those pesky 4K video files and the giant archives of RAW photos we all probably secretly have somewhere. In fact, even getting the PR team to send me a sample was a challenge (Hi, Toby!) because they were adamant that this was not a product for gamers. Well, let me tell you, Sandisk, you couldn’t be more wrong. Why am I so convinced of this? Let me explain.

The large change between this and the SN5000 is what Sandisk has done with NAND.

Instead, it effectively replaced the 162-layer BiCS6 QLC NAND flash memory with a 218-layer BiCS8 3D QLC configuration, while dramatically reducing the bit size. This was achieved mainly by stacking more layers vertically, but Sandisk says it also improved “lateral scaling,” where the company managed to reduce the horizontal cell size (the bit where the ones and zeros are). In fact, this is the same technology and number of layers found in the now legendary Sandisk WD Black SN8100 (though it uses TLC instead of QLC flash).

This gives us much better scaling and allows Sandisk to effectively accommodate 4TB of memory in a single NAND package. Which in turn improves energy efficiency, reduces latency, and drastically helps speed up the drive. Something that the benchmarks show quite clearly, but more on that in a moment. Other than that, the overall design has changed very little. It is still a single-sided M.2 2280 format, ensuring wide compatibility with consoles, laptops and PCs alike; it still has a Sandisk Polaris 3 controller, and of course you get the same warranties and bells and whistles that we’ve come to expect from SSDs on the market.

Testbed for PC gamers
Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X | ARIES: 64 GB (2×32 GB) Team Group T-Create Expert DDR5 @ 6000 C34 | Graphics Processor: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super | Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi/NZXT N9 X870E | CPU Cooler: Asus ROG Reujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | Charger: 1200W NZXT C1200 (2024) 80+ Gold | Chassis: Geometric model of the future 5

The good news is that the performance gains from this one change were excellent. It’s a semi-budget drive that performs like no other I’ve tested. Sequential reading and writing allowed the maximum utilize of PCIe 4.0 bandwidth with a speed of 7.3 GB/s reading and 6.7 GB/s writing. The 3DMark SSD benchmark was also really impressive, with a score of 3915, with an SSD throughput of 672.63 and latency of just 59 ns. That’s actually on par with some of the newer PCIe 5.0 SSDs I’ve tested (it’s only 100MB/s compared to the Crucial T710, for example, and even completely beats many early PCIe 5.0 drives).

But it’s the random 4K performance that really shines a featherlight on just how far this drive has come. Simply put, it achieved 107 MB/s reading and 308 MB/s writing. This reading score, arguably more vital to gamers, is the second highest I’ve ever tested, only beaten by the SN8100. No other drive, PCIe 5.0 or 4.0, can beat it. Write performance is slightly slower, but from a technology perspective it shouldn’t be anywhere near this level.

This in turn also translates into game load times, and again in our load time tests Final Fantasy achieved a comfortable 7.125 seconds, which also puts it on par with some of Crucial’s best offerings. All this while reaching a cozy 61 degrees, well beyond what I would describe as “hot” (though remember that it’s connected to the motherboard’s passive heatsink, which is an aluminum block).

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However, the pricing here is where things get a little crazy. When I first tested this method in October 2025 (before the madness that was Black Friday and the subsequent tardy rise in NAND prices thanks to our always-favorite AI bubble that turned into the gigantic nightmare it has become), I found the price to be astonishingly low – $130. Since then, Sandisk has increased the price by an additional $50. That’s quite a leap.

While this suits most of the industry at this point, you can also get the SN7100 with a 2TB TLC drive for the same price. This is a problem because the SN7100 is naturally better suited to transferring larger files, at least once the pseudo SLC cache is exhausted, making it the much better choice of the two. Granted, our benchmarks don’t really show this with the SN7100’s slower 4K random read speeds and faster game load times, but keep in mind that we were actually testing the 1TB model, not the 2TB SN5100 we have here (which has the smaller pSLC configuration).

So for a contemporary QLC drive, the SN5100 is impressive. It has its limitations; it’s still QLC, so you’ll invariably hit throttling at some point with such massive file transfers, but if all you do is load games from this device or run the odd program, you’ll find some of the best TLC SSDs money can buy.

But there’s a catch. Right now, with such a tumultuous market and current prices, if you can find a slightly older TLC drive for the same or less money, you will invariably get better performance for the same price. Especially when it comes to larger transfers (say, downloading and installing a game over Ethernet Gb+). Unfortunately, until Sandisk and the broader NAND market get a handle on flash demand (or, dare I say, the AI ​​bubble “stabilizes”), this isn’t a situation that’s likely to resolve any time soon. So is SN5100 any good? Is it worth buying? Yes and also no. It just depends on the price and whether any of the large seven CEOs need another yacht or not.

Best SSD for gaming 2025