If you're planning to put a CPU with more than a dozen cores and two screaming-fast SLI video cards in your next gaming rig or workstation, you're off to a good start toward extreme performance. But you should also be thinking about adding a high-performance M.2 solid-state drive (SSD), such as Western Digital's WD Black NVMe SSD ($399 for 1TB as tested), to serve as your primary boot drive. Reading and writing data from your primary storage or boot drive can be just as critical as processing power when it comes to running specialized programs or demanding games at tip-top speed. The 1TB version we tested is an excellent all-around performer at a reasonable cost per gigabyte, which helps it unseat the Samsung SSD 960 EVO as our Editors' Choice for best high-performance internal M.2 SSD.
WD Black: Shades of Gray
Western Digital offers a handful of different drive families with the "Black" designation, some of them SSDs and some of them conventional platter hard drives. ("Black" indicates that they're intended for high-end PCs.)
On the SSD side of things, you'll find the moniker on two lines of internal SSDs that the company sells: the newer WD Black NVMe being reviewed here, and the 2017-era WD Black PCIe. Both come in the diminutive, gumstick-size M.2 form factor, which means they install directly into a slot on the motherboard (assuming you've got a recent motherboard that supports M.2). That's instead of taking up space in a full-size expansion slot or drive bay.
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The similarities don't end there. Both of them use the speedy PCI Express (PCIe) bus (not to be confused with a PCI Express slot) instead of the older, slower Serial ATA (ATA) bus. And both, despite their names, support the NVMe drive-control protocol. (For more on NVMe and other key SSD lingo, check out our explainer Buying a Solid-State Drive: 20 Terms You Need to Know.) Each comes with a five-year warranty, which compares favorably with the relatively short three years that Samsung offers for its competing M.2 version of the SSD 960 EVO. And both offer an excellent mean time to failure (MTTF) rating of 1.75 million hours.
You'll note two key differences between the WD Black PCIe and the WD Black NVMe. The more obvious one is price. In addition to PCMag's 1TB review unit, which lists for $399, you can buy a Black NVMe drive at 500GB ($199), or 250GB ($109). Compare that to the regular WD Black PCIe drive, which comes in cheaper, at $93 for the 256GB version, and tops out at a 512GB capacity for $180.
The second difference between the two is their potential throughput, which helps explain the price differences. The WD Black NVMe makes use of a newer 64-layer MLC version of the 3D NAND memory modules that are the building blocks of high-end SSDs. It offers extraordinarily low latency and high power efficiency compared with the cheaper but more prevalent TLC NAND. As a result, the 1TB version of the WD Black NVMe drive promises theoretical maximum read speeds of up to 3,400MBps for sequential reads, and top write speeds just under that amount (2,800MBps).
In testing, I didn't hit those theoretical heights with regularity. It's likely that you won't either, because many external factors affect drive-access speeds, and there's always some overhead involved. But the fact remains that the potential of the WD Black NVMe is far greater than not only its WD Black PCIe sibling, but also less-expensive M.2 drives from other manufacturers, such as the SATA-based Crucial MX200 ($41.50 at Amazon) or the PCIe-based Plextor M8Pe. These typically top out at around 2,000MBps for PCIe-bus drives, or 500MBps for SATA drives.
Of course, any M.2 SSD that uses the PCIe bus will be significantly better than a SATA drive, and light years ahead of a conventional spinning drive. So why shell out extra for the WD Black NVMe version over the Black PCIe? In a word: headroom. The Black NVMe's eyebrow-raising performance means that it will likely never be a significant bottleneck in any system you build today, and the same goes for when you upgrade the rest of the components in a few years.
Performance (As Usual) Scales by Capacity
One important caveat is that the advertised maximum performance of the WD Black NVMe drops off a bit for the 512GB version, and significantly so with the 256GB one. The 512GB version sees a slight downtick in the theoretical maximum write speed (2,500MBps, down from 2,800MBps on the 1TB); the rated write speeds are the same. And in both reads and writes with the 256GB version, you'll see a larger drop (3,000MBps max for reads and 1,600MBps for writes, versus 3,400MBps and 2,800MBps, respectively, with the 1TB).
That said, the WD Black NVMe is not unique in this regard. It is not unusual to see lesser performance ratings for reads and writes as you go down the capacity stack in a given family of SSDs. As a result, bear in mind that the numbers I saw in testing are likely to be the best you'll get from this family of drive, seeing as the test drive was the top-capacity 1TB model.
Western Digital projects that the 1TB version of the WD Black NVMe will wear out after 600 total terabytes written (TBW). The 500GB version is rated at 300TBW, while the 250GB model will reach the end of its life after 200TBW.
Testing: Serious NVMe Speedster
To gauge just how snappy the WD Black NVMe's read and write performance is, I subjected it first to the Crystal DiskMark 6.0 drive benchmark, using default settings. Here, it recorded sequential-read performance of 3,129MBps, and sequential-write performance of 2,783MBps. A sequential-read speed of greater than 3,000MBps is very impressive, and not far from the theoretical maximum that Western Digital advertises. The write speed was even better, at just a few megabytes per second off the theoretical maximum.
Sequential speeds are important if you're working with very large files for image or video editing, or you play lots of games with large levels that take a long time to load with traditional hard drives. The Black NVMe's sequential results compare favorably with those of one of the drive's chief competitors, the Samsung SSD 960 EVO . On Crystal Diskmark 6.0's sequential tests, the Samsung drive's read speed of 3,169MBps is nearly identical, but its write speed of 1,726MBps (though still very fast, by most measures) was left in the dust.
Other typical data-access tasks, such as opening and closing programs, or launching an operating system, require accessing lots of smaller files. In these scenarios, the read and write speeds that show up in testing will typically be far lower than the sequential read and write maximums. To see how well drives perform on these tasks, we measure the 4K random read and write performance using Crystal DiskMark at lower queue depths (above), as well as the SSD-centric AS-SSD benchmark (below).
With 4K reads of 37MBps and writes of 194MBps as measured by AS-SSD, the Black NVMe is in line with the SSD 960 EVO (38MBps read, 176MBps write).
Our final throughput test, also charted above, simulates copying large files, as well as groups of files, between two locations on the SSD itself using the Copy Benchmark built into the AS-SSD testing utility. The Copy Benchmark comprises three separate subtests that show copy performance with one big file (an ISO image), a folder of small files (a desktop app), and a folder with a mix of big and small files (a game install). The WD Black NVMe copied the ISO at 1,533MBps, the game at 770MBps, and the app at just 367MBps. The Samsung SSD 960 EVO offered similar relative results, at 1,605MBps for the ISO sample file, an identical 770MBps for the game folder, and 294MBps for the program files. Although lower than the theoretical maximum sequential read and write speeds, these random reads/writes and file-transfer results are still excellent.
For further proof of the Black's prowess when it comes to everyday tasks, consider that it recorded a score of 5,065 on the all-encompassing PCMark 8 Storage test. Most high-performance drives score around 4,900 on this test, and any result above 5,000 is excellent. It's worth noting that the Samsung SSD 960 EVO logged an almost identical result on the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark (5,060), essentially a margin-of-error tie.
A Reasonable Cost Per Gigabyte
The fact that the WD Black NVMe SSD delivers all this performance for a reasonable 39 cents per gigabyte (in the 1TB version we tested) is even more impressive. We use 40 cents per gigabyte as a handy yardstick when evaluating high-performance internal SSDs, as well as external SSDs. Any lower than this, and the drive probably doesn't include technologies like 3D NAND or NVMe that let it achieve maximum throughput. Any higher, and you might be overpaying.
Indeed, escaping the dread of overpaying is part of what makes the WD Black NVMe so appealing. Intel's Optane drives and Samsung's SSD 970 EVO and SSD 970 Pro ostensibly offer better performance. (We haven't yet had the opportunity to test the latest Samsung models, and thus compare their numbers directly to the Black NVMe's results, outside of theoretical specs.) However, even without formal test results, it's clear that the SSD 970 Pro is priced at a premium ($499) for a 1TB version whose advertised maximum read speed is just 100MBps higher and whose rated write speed is 100MBps lower than the WD Black NVMe's. Samsung uses its own 3D NAND technology and includes advanced thermal management, which may drive up costs, but the SSD 970 Pro has the same five-year warranty as the Black NVMe. An Intel Optane drive is an even tougher sell, since it's not even offered in capacities above 500GB. The top Optane at this writing was a 380GB drive, the Optane 905P.
As a result, the WD Black NVMe hits a sweet spot in the middle of the price, capacity, and performance triad. That's especially true when you compare it with the also-excellent Samsung SSD 960 EVO, which records similar performance numbers except for its much lower maximum sequential-write score. When combined with everything else that's excellent about the WD Black NVMe, its superior write performance is enough to push it to the top of our recommendations for the best high-performance internal M.2 SSD, whether you spring for the 1TB version or opt for the lesser 512GB one. We don't expect that you'd be able to "feel" the downturn in performance from the 256GB model, but the upper two are the best values across all three of the key SSD vectors.
Available in a capacious 1TB version and boasting screaming read/write speeds, the WD Black NVMe is an excellent M.2 SSD to install in a gaming rig or media-editing workstation.
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