The Western Digital SN5000S is a solid-state drive in the M.2 2280 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 512 GB 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 Toshiba. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are soaked up 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 4,200 MB/s write; random IOPS reach up to 500K for reads and 850K 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 150 TBW, a relatively low value compared to other SSDs.