The Western Digital SN5000S is a solid-state drive in the M.2 2230 form factor, launched on March 14th, 2024. It is available in capacities ranging from 512 GB to 2 TB. This page reports specifications for the 1 TB variant. With the rest of the system, the Western Digital SN5000S interfaces using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection. The SSD controller is the Polaris 3 A101-000103-A1 from WD, a DRAM cache is not available. Western Digital has installed 162-layer QLC NAND flash on the SN5000S, the flash chips are made by Kioxia. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are handled more quickly. Thanks to support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface, performance is excellent. The SN5000S is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 6,000 MB/s and 5,400 MB/s write; random IO reaches 750K IOPS for read and 900K for writes.
The SSD's price at launch is unknown. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Western Digital guarantees an endurance rating of 300 TBW, a relatively low value compared to other SSDs.