Final Thoughts
The launch of the WD Black NVMe SSD is in our opinion one of the biggest launches for the company. It is something that Western Digital has really needed and finally brings them into the discussion for high-end NVMe drives. The high-performance NVMe market is mainly dominated by Samsung, and this drive offers great competition.
When it comes to performance the WD Black NVMe SSD is the fastest drive we’ve ever tested! In ATTO Disk Benchmark we achieved read and write speeds of 3380 MB/s and 2859 MB/s respectively. When it came to CrystalDiskMark we achieved a very similar 3453 MB/s and 2852 MB/s. Scores were very consistent across all of the benchmarks that we ran.
One thing that this drive did not have a problem with was overheating. That was a major issue with other NVMe drives. During our testing the drive would idle around 41C and the max temperature we recorded was 67C. So you won’t need to strap on an aftermarket M.2 cooler to keep the drive cool so it won’t throttle.
WD has many advantages since they designed the drive completely in-house. They have more control over the different parts and how they interact together. This is why you see such great performance as well good thermal performance.
The drive will be available in 1TB ($449), 500GB ($229.99), and 250GB ($119.99)_versions. All of which are backed by a 5-year warranty. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Western Digital WD Black NVMe SSD a 10 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!
Pros:
– 3400 MB/s read, 2800 MB/s write speeds!
– No overheating issues
– Single-sided for better compatibility
– Developed completely in-house by WD
Cons:
– None that we found
