Western Digital Intros 8TB Variant of WD Black SN850X SSD

[btarunr]

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.



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[GhostRyder]

Man I like the idea of these high capacity drives, but the cost is still too high beyond 2tb. I mean these could be great for a PS5, but it costs more than 2 PS5's currently (Digital).

 

[bug]

$50 for a heatsink? I can get a beefy CPU cooler for that much.

 

[windwhirl]

The write endurance of the 8 TB variant is rated at an impressive 4,800 TBW.

Eh, it's fairly meh, 4800 / 8 = 600 cycles.

Dare I say it's even rather bad endurance for a TLC drive.

 

[Assimilator]

Give us cheap 8TB QLC drives, not expensive 8TB TLC ones you muppets.

 

[Frick]

Give us cheap 8TB QLC drives, not expensive 8TB TLC ones you muppets.

Now you've done it. QLC is literally evil, haven't you heard? The only pure and good and moral SSD storage is SLC, everything is literally garbage and if you let QLC drives near your PC it will take down whatever OS you have installed on it within hours.

 

[efikkan]

The SN850X series have been rather great deal for consumer SSDs; top-notch performance while being much cheaper than many comparable models, most of which are overpriced "junk" white-label products anyways. At least these are decent quality.

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.

Eh, it's fairly meh, 4800 / 8 = 600 cycles.

Dare I say it's even rather bad endurance for a TLC drive.

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.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

The price is a major improvement over the sabarent drives, which still go for $1100 for the 8TB version. Competition is great!

Now you've done it. QLC is literally evil, haven't you heard? The only pure and good and moral SSD storage is SLC, everything is literally garbage and if you let QLC drives near your PC it will take down whatever OS you have installed on it within hours.

This but unironically.

Eh, it's fairly meh, 4800 / 8 = 600 cycles.

Dare I say it's even rather bad endurance for a TLC drive.

For comparison, a 2TB crucial MX 500 has a TBW of 360. Divided by 2, that gives us 180 cycles.

600, by comparison, is amazing. Most TLC drives are only rated for ~300 at most. 600 is highly unusual.

 

[Klemc]

400 euro the Samsung 870 QVO MZ-77Q8T0BW
800 euro the Corsair MP600 Pro NH CSSD-F8000GBMP600PNH

Now i can backup my NVMe to SSD, but it costed an arm

 

[mechtech]

Give you $500 cad for one WD.

 

[Metroid]

Funny the 4tb = 246 usd and this is 899 usd wth? The day they make this 8tb for 500 usd then they have a deal.

 

[Tropick]

Now you've done it. QLC is literally evil, haven't you heard? The only pure and good and moral SSD storage is SLC, everything is literally garbage and if you let QLC drives near your PC it will take down whatever OS you have installed on it within hours.

I can confirm this. One of my friends picked up a Samsung QVO drive a few years back, made the mistake of not wearing gloves when installing it. Poor guy doesn't even remember his own name now..

 

[natr0n]

Bills getting barely paid nation wide and these mf asking $899.

 

[phil995511]

This SSD costs 25% more than the new business laptop I just bought for my daughter (8 cores/16 threads + 1GB SSD + 16GB RAM). Do they really want to sell them ? Because with prices like that, no one will want them, they really take people for fools ;.-(

 

[Bwaze]

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.

That could be said for many PC products. High end consumer graphics cards - why not buy a Workstation card? They have an RTX 6000 with 48 GB, for sweet $6800, and that's only repackaged gaming card with extra memory... And there are many more expensive products. CPUs - why do you want a 16 core Ryzen, when you have Threadrippers with 64 cores for just $4999? And there are of course Epyc CPUs north of $10.000... Etc... You can't justify it? Then why do you want their cheaper alternatives?

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...

 

[azrael]

Man I like the idea of these high capacity drives, but the cost is still too high beyond 2tb. I mean these could be great for a PS5, but it costs more than 2 PS5's currently (Digital).

The 4 TB Lexar NM790 I got late last year was a steal though, all things considered. I paid around 200€ for it, including 25% VAT.

 

[Chrispy_]

That's cool, but the real market demand is for more cost-competitive 4TB and 8TB offerings.

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.

 

[bonehead123]

The 4 TB Lexar NM790 I got late last year was a steal though, all things considered. I paid around 200€ for it, including 25% VAT.

Yep, but I got a bunch of 4TB 850X's in Dec 23 for ~$255-275, so THAT was a steal IMO

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

That's cool, but the real market demand is for more cost-competitive 4TB and 8TB offerings.

Which this is. the only other option readily available is the rocket 4 plus from sabarent, at $1200. So this represents a 25% price cut.

Where's the SN580 4TB, for example?

https://www.amazon.com/WD_BLACK-SN850X-Internal-Gaming-Solid/dp/B0B7CQ2CHH?th=1

This one?

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.

4TB drives are quite affordable today. $250 is a steal for 4TB NVMe drives.

 

[Bwaze]

Which this is. the only other option readily available is the rocket 4 plus from sabarent, at $1200. So this represents a 25% price cut.

Surely it's not that bad? ADATA was available in the past for just a bit over 700 EUR, in Europe this WD will be much more expensive.

 

[GhostRyder]

Funny the 4tb = 246 usd and this is 899 usd wth? The day they make this 8tb for 500 usd then they have a deal.

I just about spit my drink out. I had not looked in awhile but I didn't see the 4tb models are now sitting at ~250. That's actually getting into the affordable range.

The 4 TB Lexar NM790 I got late last year was a steal though, all things considered. I paid around 200€ for it, including 25% VAT.

Which this is. the only other option readily available is the rocket 4 plus from sabarent, at $1200. So this represents a 25% price cut.

https://www.amazon.com/WD_BLACK-SN850X-Internal-Gaming-Solid/dp/B0B7CQ2CHH?th=1

This one?

4TB drives are quite affordable today. $250 is a steal for 4TB NVMe drives.

Yea and apparently I have been living under a rock because I didn't see 4tb drives were under 400 now.

 

[Bwaze]

I just about spit my drink out. I had not looked in awhile but I didn't see the 4tb models are now sitting at ~250. That's actually getting into the affordable range.



Yea and apparently I have been living under a rock because I didn't see 4tb drives were under 400 now.

Last year you could get various NVMe 4TB drives for 160 - 180 EUR… Not the fastest drives, but still PCIe 4.0. At that price per TB I’d buy an 8 TB drive in a heartbeat. But the only thing remotely close was Samsung QVO, and I just could award a total stagnation in tech…

 

[windwhirl]

Most TLC drives are only rated for ~300 at most. 600 is highly unusual.

For a TLC drive at this price, I think it's trash.

 

[Tomorrow]

Now you've done it. QLC is literally evil, haven't you heard? The only pure and good and moral SSD storage is SLC, everything is literally garbage and if you let QLC drives near your PC it will take down whatever OS you have installed on it within hours.

Setting aside the obvious endurance issue - QLC has not taken off because it's not cheap enough. Not because it has too few P/E cycles.
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€.

 

[bug]

I just about spit my drink out. I had not looked in awhile but I didn't see the 4tb models are now sitting at ~250. That's actually getting into the affordable range.

I got 4TB TLC for ~$200 last year already. No PCIe5, but at that price, who cares? Plus, it's a backup drive, so PCIe4 is more than enough.
Most TLC drives in that range use Chinese YMTC memory, but not all.