Western Digital Intros 8TB Variant of WD Black SN850X SSD

[phints]

This SSD has been around for years, are they gonna make a sequel for PCIe 5.0 or what? Wondering if it'll come in time for a 9800X3D build.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

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.

Most of the cheap SSDs I have picked up (SATA, but still) were older revisions of TLC instead of QLC. New production using something like Micron 64- or 96-layer, which Micron or someone was selling for cheap after new NAND came out.

You say that is not a sustainable business model, but someday 232-layer will be as cutting-edge (/s) as 64-layer is today.

 

[starfals]

Nice and overpriced lol. Call me again when its a lot closer to 500, hek.. even 400.

 

[A&P211]

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

Cheaper QLC 8tb are out there, well not much cheaper.

I have the white label version of this drive in my laptop right now 8TB, I got 2 of them, I've had them for over a year. WD seems late to the party. A few other companies have the same drive in different names/models.

 

[unwind-protect]

Price looks pretty competitive to me. It's not that there are cheaper 8 TB NVMe on the market.

 

[Minus Infinity]

Tough choice 4TB for $246 or 8TB for $900. My math isn't great, but I think the 8TB is a bit worse value

Early adopter tax I hope, and prices will eventually plummet down to like 1.9x 4TB at most.

 

[Bwaze]

You can't charge early adopters tax if you're not early, sorry. 2019 called with Samsung QVO, and since then, dozens of other drives.

That was five years ago!

Can we stop naming 8 TB drives as "enormous, gigantic, massive, thicc..."?

Remember when we had graphs on when SSDs will overtake HDDs in price per TB and in maximum capacity, since HDDs can't just squeeze extra data or and extra platters?

First consumer 8 TB HDD came in only 2014. In 2019 we had 16 TB disks. And now you can buy 30 TB.

Largest available consumer SSD in 2014 was 1 TB. In 2019 you could buy an 8 TB drive. And now in 2024 we are here arguing if anyone really needs 8 TB drive, and if they really need to come down in price?

 

[A&P211]

You can't charge early adopters tax if you're not early, sorry. 2019 called with Samsung QVO, and since then, dozens of other drives.

That was five years ago!

Can we stop naming 8 TB drives as "enormous, gigantic, massive, thicc..."?

Remember when we had graphs on when SSDs will overtake HDDs in price per TB and in maximum capacity, since HDDs can't just squeeze extra data or and extra platters?

First consumer 8 TB HDD came in only 2014. In 2019 we had 16 TB disks. And now you can buy 30 TB.

Largest available consumer SSD in 2014 was 1 TB. In 2019 you could buy an 8 TB drive. And now in 2024 we are here arguing if anyone really needs 8 TB drive, and if they really need to come down in price?

You cant really compare a SATA drive with a m.2 drive. The 1st 8tb m.2 drive came out around April of 2020, the 8TB QVO came out in May or June of 2020. Both are QLC drives, the TLC version of the 8tb came out around 2022 at $1300. I remember that Sabrent was the 1st ones of the TLC 8TB version.

 

[Bwaze]

Yes, completely changing the form from spacious 2.5" enclosures to thumb drives for all the drives was dumb. Just because we wanted to buy drives with blazing fast speed - which is kind of fake anyway, most of the drives still don't max out SATA limit once you use up the cache...


I was thinking of graphs like this one. They are a bit counter intuitive, because they're logarithmic - in reality the difference in price per TB is much larger:

But this is now generated or added to by some redditor, not by industry or tech journalist, and is based on drives that have lowest cost per TB - that means it doesn't really matter that we haven't seen any increase in capacity in last 5 years, and it also doesn't show (apart from a slight bump, which already tells a lot, this is logarithmic) the large disruption that jump from SATA to M.2 caused - because SATA drives were still selling at the time, and then lower capacity M.2 drives take over. Also, what is not shown is a large disruption in late 2023 from $35/TB to suddenly $50/TB, and it's now only down to $45/TB... Such sudden price changes over entire stacks aren't business as usual. And it shallows the hell off that projected line on when we will achieve parity with HDDs - if it stays like this untill the end of year.

Such graphs with one entry per year also don't show the whole picture - we had SSD price increase in late 2023, but the entry for that year is of course low price before that. The high prices are now holding for more than half a year, but if we get some deals for Christmas it could again show steady price in graph, although in reality most of the year the prices will be terrible compared to last year

By various older, pre "M.2 shift" graphs we should already be in the intersection... In fact if you extend the pre-2019 line you arrive around here.

 

[chrcoluk]

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.


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.

I find this comment interesting, as in many previous posts, people state that we need lots and lots of M.2 slots.

So if a 8TB NVME drive is too much for consumers, then why do we need more than a couple of M.2 slots? What's the difference between say 4 2TB drives, 2 4TB drives and 1 8TB drive? The latter is more efficient.

Also swapping it out every few years seems odd I have never treated any of my storage in that way, and I wont do so moving forward, I do value the money I have.

8TB enterprise NVME? a slight problem need access to U.2.

Also finally, if you hitting 600 erase cycles within 3 years on a 8TB drive, then its not consumer type usage, that would be 2400TB of data within 3 years excluding write amplification.

I cant comment on the 600 erase cycles corruption thing though given its very hard to work a modern drive that hard, older smaller drives with horrid write amplification is a different matter though, so take e.g. the Samsung 830, planar MLC, 128 gigs, my 830s currently have erase cycles in the 100s. But they are the only drive to do so, my 850 Pro which is approaching a decade of age, still hasnt done 100 cycles and it was previously used as a PS4 SSD which auto recorded game footage, and prior to that was my main SSD on my PC, my desktop 860 EVO 3D TLC is fairly old at this point also and has done 6 erase cycles, power on time is 38766 hours. 850 pro 3D MLC 1/2 TB power on hours 78907, cycles 86.

Yes, completely changing the form from spacious 2.5" enclosures to thumb drives for all the drives was dumb. Just because we wanted to buy drives with blazing fast speed - which is kind of fake anyway, most of the drives still don't max out SATA limit once you use up the cache...

Ironically on the SATA SSDs I currently use, I feel the pSLC is pointless for performance as they only slow down a very small amount after its exhausted, its main benefit is likely on the endurance side.

Tough choice 4TB for $246 or 8TB for $900. My math isn't great, but I think the 8TB is a bit worse value

Early adopter tax I hope, and prices will eventually plummet down to like 1.9x 4TB at most.

I think it will eventually go down to within 2.5x of 4TB, I remember when 4TB NVME drives were horrificly priced compared to 2TB and now they have hit saner levels. Spindles have gone through the same phases as well, the biggest spindles often have had really whacky prices, but then when volume increases the prices go down.

 

[Bwaze]

Yeah, biggest drives always have a premium. So I think we won't see reasonably priced 8 TB drives until companies release 12 and 16 TB models on those new advertised technologies.

But at that point it will be 6 or 7 years since we got 8 TB on SSDs, and I'll be bitching why are the larger drives at twice the price per TB!

 

[FoulOnWhite]

Already got a 4TB version, would love an 8, but $850 yikes

 

[GhostRyder]

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.

Yea at those speeds already its almost irrelevant. I mean lets be frank, when you get to a certain point the loading for games and other programs have so many tiny files these drives rarely rev up to their max speed. Its really beneficial to content creators who have and move huge files around.

I guess the whole time I was looking at only the Samsung very high end or Sabrent and missed the other brands like WD black dropping the price down to reasonable levels.

 

[Chrispy_]

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.

Amazon.com

This one?

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

You misread, I think.

I said SN580, WD's budget blue line of drives, which stops at just 2TB - not the 850X flagship. They don't even make a 4TB SN580, let alone an 8TB one :'(

8TB drives sure are premium still, but 4TB drives are cheap, which is why I raised the original point that WD don't offer any cheap 4TB drives when everyone else does. An 8TB budget drive would be lovely, but that's probably wishful thinking since the maximum-density NAND won't be any cheaper and the controller/DRAM savings are marginal when so much of the BOM is NAND.

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

Huh? All drives are TLC at this price. If you want MLC or SLC you need to pay 10-100x more for an enterprise solution that will be almost impossible to even buy as a consumer. I might be wrong but I think the last MLC drive you could reasonably find on the market was the Samsung 970 Pro from 2018, and it was quickly superseded by the 980 Pro with TLC because the 970 Pro's MLC made it waaaaaay too expensive for marginal gains over the TLC competition that was also bumping up against the ~7GB/s limit of PCIe 4.0 for a lot less money.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

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

Which TLC drive has a significantly higher TBW rating at a comparable price?

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.

View attachment 355376

Those cheaper drives are DRAM-less, and in the case of the ADATA, mixed reviews and quality issues. The WD black is more comparable to the likes of the rocket, which has DRAM.

The other comparable drives are $1000+

You misread, I think.

I said SN580, WD's budget blue line of drives, which stops at just 2TB - not the 850X flagship. They don't even make a 4TB SN580, let alone an 8TB one :'(

8TB drives sure are premium still, but 4TB drives are cheap, which is why I raised the original point that WD don't offer any cheap 4TB drives when everyone else does. An 8TB budget drive would be lovely, but that's probably wishful thinking since the maximum-density NAND won't be any cheaper and the controller/DRAM savings are marginal when so much of the BOM is NAND.

Yeah, I thought you said 850.

I think the reason there is no 580 is simple: 8TB is for nerds. Just like 1TB drives were when they first came out, most people didnt want nor need that capacity. Even then, it wasnt comparable, back then backing up your media was a lot more common. Today in the world of streaming, most consumers dont even consider local storage. Its only a small number of us that want 8TB drives, or larger, thus the silly pricing. Which means they are in no hurry to release budget models.

 

[Bwaze]

"'640Kb should be enough for anyone!"

- Bill Gates, 1981

 

[Prima.Vera]

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.

Nah, still too expensive. For some reasons, the producers don't want to lower the prices for the past 5 years...

"'640Kb should be enough for anyone!"

- Bill Gates, 1981

This is 43 years old melodrama, when the PC was working totally different from what it is today.

 

[Assimilator]

This is 43 years old melodrama, when the PC was working totally different from what it is today.

It's also taken out of context.

 

[Klemc]

"'640Kb should be enough for anyone!"

- Bill Gates, 1981

I'm born the year next.

 

[mahirzukic2]

Tough choice 4TB for $246 or 8TB for $900. My math isn't great, but I think the 8TB is a bit worse value

Early adopter tax I hope, and prices will eventually plummet down to like 1.9x 4TB at most.

But the thing is there is no early adopter tax here, since this isn't a new and unexplored technology.
This is the same thing which exists for a while now, just more of it. Using the same PCB, controllers, etc.
This is stupidity tax.

 

[Athlonite]

Well 4x the price for 2x the storage capacity what's not to like about that (/s)

when 2TB NVMe SSD's aren't 4x the price of 1TB NVMe SSD's and 4TB ones aren't 4x the price of 2TB ones either

WD must think we're all stupid

 

[R-T-B]

everything is literally garbage

Thanks frick.

 

[evernessince]

Priced at around existing offerings on the consumer market with poor endurance. The only defining factor of this drive is that it's likely the lowest latency 8TB M.2 drive on the market (although probably not as good as the lower capacity variants of the SN850X as 8TB drives often come with a latency penalty). You are paying a huge premium for what is in essence a large capacity game drive. Questionable that you'd not just get two 4TB SN850Xs unless all your M.2s are filled and your expansion slots. For every other use case makes sense to just get something else, enterprise 7.36TB runs around $450 - $550 for TLC.