Introduction

Western Digital (or simply WD), is the world's largest manufacturer of storage solutions, mostly known for their wide range of hard disk offerings. With their acquisition of SanDisk in 2016, WD became one of the largest manufacturers for flash storage, too.

Today, we are reviewing the company's 2018 enthusiast-class NVMe M.2 solid-state drive simply called "WD Black NVMe". This is slightly confusing as they released SSDs in 2017 and 2018 that are both using the WD Black SSD name, so the company is now adding "2018" where it can, but not all stores might follow that naming scheme. It's easy to tell the drives apart visually: the WD Black 2017 uses a blue PCB, whereas the WD Black 2018 (this review) comes with a black PCB.

WD has paired an 8-channel SanDisk SSD controller with SanDisk 15 nanometer 3D TLC flash chips that are produced through a partnership between Toshiba and SanDisk. As mentioned before, the form factor of the drive is M.2, using the fast PCI-Express interface with four active lanes (PCIe 3.0 x4).

The WD Black 2018 SSD is available in capacities of 250 GB ($70), 500 GB ($105), and 1 TB ($290). Endurance for the tested 500 GB version is rated at 300 TBW; the 250 GB version has 200 TB and the 1 TB model is rated for 600 TBW.