Tuesday, July 16th 2024
Western Digital Intros 8TB Variant of WD Black SN850X SSD
Western Digital stealthily introduced a spacious 8 TB variant of its performance WD Black SN850X M.2 NVMe Gen 4 SSD. The drive debuted in 2022 and had topped off at 4 TB. The new 8 TB variant is priced at $849 for the bare drive (without heatsink, model number WDS800T2X0E), and $899 with the PS5-friendly heatsink (model: WDS800T2XHE). The drive combines an in-house controller by Western Digital, with KIOXIA-sourced 3D TLC NAND flash. We're not sure if it's using the same 112-layer BiCS5 that the 4 TB variant does.
Western Digital claims performance figures of up to 7200 MB/s sequential reads, up to 6600 MB/s sequential writes, and up to 1.2 million IOPS 4K random reads/writes. The read speed is a touch lesser than the 7300 MB/s max sequential reads of the 4 TB variant. The write endurance of the 8 TB variant is rated at an impressive 4,800 TBW. Built in the M.2-2280 form-factor the drive takes advantage of the PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface. Western Digital is backing these drives with 5-year warranties.
Source:
momomo_us (Twitter)
Western Digital claims performance figures of up to 7200 MB/s sequential reads, up to 6600 MB/s sequential writes, and up to 1.2 million IOPS 4K random reads/writes. The read speed is a touch lesser than the 7300 MB/s max sequential reads of the 4 TB variant. The write endurance of the 8 TB variant is rated at an impressive 4,800 TBW. Built in the M.2-2280 form-factor the drive takes advantage of the PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface. Western Digital is backing these drives with 5-year warranties.
47 Comments on Western Digital Intros 8TB Variant of WD Black SN850X SSD
Dare I say it's even rather bad endurance for a TLC drive.
But who would want 8 TB for a consumer grade SSD? If you really need that much fast storage, you probably can justify some enterprise grade stuff.And yet those numbers are still very inflated, as always. You will not be able to do 600 overwrites of the drive before you see the first corruption.
Consumer grade SSDs are pretty much "disposable" (at least after the great Samsung 970 Pro left the market), better replace them every 2-3 years if you like your files.
600, by comparison, is amazing. Most TLC drives are only rated for ~300 at most. 600 is highly unusual.
800 euro the Corsair MP600 Pro NH CSSD-F8000GBMP600PNH
Now i can backup my NVMe to SSD, but it costed an arm
There are tons of uses for larger SSDs in consumer space that doesn't bring lots of cash. Photo, video editing with higher resolution cameras now really requires huge storage space, a single 4K RAW project can be several TB in size. People shouldn't be doing it unless it's paid well? Nobody pays for this well any more.
It's really strange why people aren't wondering why the hell has the progress completely stopped, the only thing changing in SSDs in last 5 years is speed in metric that is mostly irrelevant, sequential speed of the cache that doesn't affect almost anything... Oh, and we got higher heat output, and for quite some time now higher prices. We already got 8TB consumer SSD back in 2019 - Samsung 870 QVO 8 TB. But in reality it's a SATA drive so blazingly fast that falls to below 100 MB/s once you fill the cache, less than half the speed of a decade old hard drive! And they're still selling it for 550 EUR...
Both WD and Kioxia have announced larger high capacity chips that will bring increased storage capacity to consumer market in the future:
16TB M.2 SSDs will soon grace the market — Kioxia unveils 2Tb 3D QLC NAND to build bigger SSDs
SSDs are about to become massive, thanks to WD
But this drive isn't it, this is double sided, filled to the brink drive - it still shouldn't be any more expensive to build than 2, 4 TB drives since it uses same PCB, controller, but for reasons companies know best the price per TB is almost twice as for smaller drives. And I think with the release of this 8 TB drive for $800+ we shouldn't be holding our breath for the new cheaper drives, it could take a while...
Where's the SN580 4TB, for example?
People generally want a relatively small capacity high-performance drive for their OS, applications, and possibly scratch volumes, but they can't afford that performance for the capacities they need for their footage/games/media/asset libraries.
This one?4TB drives are quite affordable today. $250 is a steal for 4TB NVMe drives.
Remember when MLC came and quickly overtook SLC because it was so much cheaper and twice the capacity?
Then TLC came along and did the same to MLC. Today there are actually fewer QLC models being sold, than MLC models.
QLC was released as a wet fart that amounted to nothing. Even most new SSD's released today are still TLC.
QLC could easily be successful if they priced it reasonably. I doubt most people would really care or notice the worse endurance if they could get a 4TB QLC for the price of 2TB TLC or better yet a 8TB QLC for the price of 4TB TLC.
To prove a point:
4TB QLC: 208€ (2,5" SATA), 232€ (M.2 PCIe 3.0)
4TB TLC: 213€ (2,5" SATA), 229€ (M.2 PCIe 4.0)
8TB QLC: 484€ (2,5" SATA), [NONE]
8TB TLC: 727€ (2,5" SATA), 773€ (M.2 PCIe 4.0)
So not only is there almost not price difference at 4TB, the TLC model is PCIe 4.0 and actually a bit cheaper. Why would ANYONE opt for QLC at those prices?
8TB is even more bizarre as there are no M.2 PCIe QLC models. And while yes the QLC version is 50% cheaper that the TLC version it's not enough. The price difference needs to be 100% so the QLC should not cost more than 363€.
Most TLC drives in that range use Chinese YMTC memory, but not all.