WD Black SN8100 2 TB NVME SSD review

Here are people, the latest and largest drive in WD, SN8100. And look, I understand these premieres, they are not very stimulating; This is not a fresh GPU, which reduces huge numbers of frames per second or an exclusive shiny, silky mechanical keyboard with pre -switched touch switches, so that the fingers are frantically itch, but hear me, this one simply strikes differently. This is unique and should be very stimulating for every technique worth salt.

Yes, in order, fresh 5.0 disks are currently ten people, and the speed involved are so overtaking the rest of the PC ecosystem that it effectively makes them pointless to a modest PC player. I see. It’s like a comparison of Lamborghini Aventador with a classy sedan of your grandmother. In order, it can do 0-60 in less than 4 seconds, but he will still get you from point A to point B for about the same amount of time, thanks to this trusted senior bottleneck, which is speed limit on the highway.

However, from time to time a drive appears that radically changes the landscape. Perhaps not in a huge way, but so much that we, journalists, sit and pay attention. Enough to pay attention and make sure you take a double shot of these figures and go: “Wait for a minute”. This is what the SN8100 is, and Western Digital knows it. It is quite directly, one of the best SSDs from 2025, and I put my hat in this statement.

This thing is unique; This is the first SSD PCIE 5.0 in the company and absolutely strikes in terms of performance. It was built at the back of the reserved controller designed internally by Sandisk (which until recently was under the WD umbrella, but now his own company), SMI2508. There is currently no huge number of data about this (I undermined WD directly on this subject), but I can say that it is standard working with the drama cache and is standard in full 8-channel project. It is completely unique for the SN8100 and is not yet found on any of the other WD product lines.

WD also went forward and connected it with Sandisk 218-Wayer BICS8 TLC 3D CBA NAND. This is the same in itself by a radical decision. Koxia has long been a partner of the NAND Flash WD with such as SN7100, SN850X and others, all with TLC in one form or another. This is probably the case with this DE-Merging WD and Sandisk, and why the huge Sandisk logo is on the reverse of this drive. It is more sandwiches than WD, because the latter focuses on the difficult disk.

The fact that NAND then supported 1 GB of Dram cache also on memory tuberculosis, all on a unilateral platform, making it ideal for almost any device that can be supported by this coefficient of 2280.

The initial start -up capacities contain both 1 TB and 2 TB configurations with or without taxes, and are also aggressively. The non-Heatsink variant, which I have here, with 2 TB, clock at the retail price of USD 280 in the USA and 227 GBP in Great Britain. Averacting approximately 0.14 USD for GB and 0.11 GBP per GB. The only drives that are still a bit close to competing with this are the older solutions of the first generation 5.0, from which the Crucial T700, or MP700 Elite Corsaira came to mind (in general slower, more effective 5.0 drive, which cannot hold the candle to the SN8100).

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And yes, don’t worry, you still get in accordance with the usual 5-year warranty and 1200 TBW strength assessment, a standard matter that nowadays.

So now, when dull things are besides, let’s talk about the performance because it is wild.

Sequential performance in Crystaldiskmark reached 14 710 Mb/s when reading and 13 926 Mb/s on the record. These numbers are the fastest I’ve ever seen on any day I’ve ever tested in this configuration, just a full stop.

Usually at this point I turn around and say: “Well, the sequences are good, but random 4K? Very bad”, as we saw from 9100 Pro Samsung and other disks. NO. 119 MB/SW Reading, 349 Mb/SW record, and nothing is approaching again. This reading speed is particularly extremely quick, 31% faster than even the best disk that I have tested so far. It’s just monstrous.

Random 4K performance is really crucial, even critical for PC players, because it generally correlates well with how games load resources, files, scenes, textures, you call it. The higher the performance, the faster it will load. Probably not surprising that once again, in Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, SN8100 just submitted competition, and the total time was only 6.575 seconds in all five scenes. Temperatures are also not absurd, because it managed all our comparative course, supplementing only 74 degrees.

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All its performance indicators simply completely destroy everything I have ever tested with a huge margin. The game changes and in the world of SSDs, in which we constantly see fractional efficiency inequalities or fresh disks, but there is a lack of one key element of speed (put in bad sequences or random 4K) so that something like this seems and simply deliver how amazing it is.

And that’s it. In the last 12 months we have had so many fresh lines 5.0. We had Samsung 9100 Pro with its mediocre 4K capacity, Black Opal X570 Biwin, which he absolutely spends during loads and overroms, but undergrowth at temperature, and Elite MP700 Corsaira, which, though impressively effective, lacks speed that we really want to see from the flagship products in this category. What WD did with the SN8100, keeping everything on its own and refining it all to such a high level, creates a product that not only provides, but is a hellish statement of what the real flagship premiere of the product should be. The one that this side of the PC community needs.

I would go to say that this is almost the perfect ride. If you want to play, if you want to render, if you want to perform a professional load on work, it has your back and then a little. If Phison has not worried about it yet, then it should be damn.