Western Digital's Black SN8100 Appears Online Ahead of Official Launch

[TheLostSwede]

It appears that Wester Digital is getting ready to launch a new performance NVMe SSD in the shape of the WD_Black SN8100, as the drive has tipped up online. Oddly enough, it's not branded as a SanDisk drive, at least not in Europe where the drive is listed for pre-order. It was first spotted by @momomo_us on Amazon Germany, but the company only had the 1 TB SKU listed and a little bit of sleuthing on our side, quickly found the 2 TB and 4 TB SKU's listed with various etailers around the world.

It seems like WD has decided to use the Silicon Motion SM2508 NVMe SSD controller for the SN8100, although this has as yet to be verified and it's likely to be an OEM version of the controller without markings if true. The SN8100 is said to deliver read speeds of up to 14,900 MB/s and write speeds of up to 14,000 MB/s, with the 1 TB SKU being a bit slower at 11,000 MB/s. It should also deliver up to 2,300K IOPS, for both read and write operations. In Europe, the MSRP currently appears to be €200, €300-310 and €550-560 respectively for the different SKUs, which is a massive increase over the SN850X, but in line with recently launched PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs like the Kingston Fury Renegade G5. It's also listed for C$374 and C$560 for the 1 TB and 2 TB SKUs respectively by a Canadian etailer and £170, £260 and £455 in the UK for each of the three SKUs. The official launch date is the 30th of May according to Amazon.



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[Chaitanya]

Interesting its still under WD branding even after the split.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Prices are getting out of control it seems. One would have thought that by now 16TB and 32TB SSD drives would have become mainstream (for the same prices as in the article), considering the latest size of the recent games, applications and stuff.

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

Prices are getting out of control it seems. One would have thought that by now 16TB and 32TB SSD drives would have become mainstream (for the same prices as in the article), considering the latest size of the recent games, applications and stuff.

Nobody sane thought that. Current SSD sizes are more than large enough for most uses. For workstations and enterprise larger capacities are there. The only issue is gaming. Gaming doesn't count. It's a lifestyle luxury hobby and a giant waste of money. There is no use in catering to PC gaming other than making stupid products to milk money from idiots. Gamers need to get that through their heads.

 

[Broken Processor]

I still don't see the need for fast gen 5 nvme I'd rather have high capacity gen 3 or 4 at a reasonable price for media or light backup 3500mb r/w is more than adequate for this

 

[Quicks]

Thought western digital pulled out if the SSD market.

 

[docnorth]

Was this naming planned or is it just "do it like the boss Samsung"?

 

[TheLostSwede]

Was this naming planned or is it just "do it like the boss Samsung"?

I would guess that they were too far along the release schedule for this model to slam on the breaks and make it a SanDisk product.
Besides, there's already an SN7100.

WD Black SN7100 2 TB Review - The New Best SSD

The WD Black SN7100 2 TB SSD sets a new standard as the fastest Gen 4 SSD we've ever tested. It's also priced well and highly energy-efficient, which helps keep temperatures down. Fast, efficient, and affordable—the WD Black SN7100 hits all the marks.

www.techpowerup.com

 

[L'Eliminateur]

The price is insane, i'd rather buy an optane P5800X at that price that will work 100 times better than anything that is released today, tomorrow and practically ever (at least one order of magnitude less worst-case latency at QD1 than the best latency any "consumer" nvme will have)

 

[Sol_Badguy]

Was this naming planned or is it just "do it like the boss Samsung"?

Probably a good amount of people were expecting SN950X -> meaning predictable = boring. So WD spiced it up and avoided being branded a boring company making boring products.
However by adopting the formatting chosen by Samsung they ended up with a lower number, and that gives off the wrong vibe, as if they're lowkey admitting their drive is slower/inferior.
But they aptly avoided that as well by putting a royal price tag on it.

 

[dyonoctis]

Prices are getting out of control it seems. One would have thought that by now 16TB and 32TB SSD drives would have become mainstream (for the same prices as in the article), considering the latest size of the recent games, applications and stuff.

The issue is that SSD manufacturer are more focused in developping drives for the lastest PCIe specs, than attempting to provide more capacity on older, but still fast enough specs. Gen 6 SSD are going to be crazy and useless for most people.

 

[Bwaze]

€550-560 EUR for a 4 TB drive? Two years ago you could buy one for 170 EUR, and you can still buy an older PCIe 3.0, 4.0 drives at 210 - 220 EUR, and I bet without a stopwatch you could hardly tell a difference in real world applications, not benchmarks (program install and startup times, load times etc)...

This is getting ridiculous. Yeah, nobody is forcing us to buy these cutting edge drives, true - but we're in a strange cycle where we're getting worse and worse deals because we're not buying enough of the same old drives with inflated sequential speed numbers (that don't even mean anything in normal desktop use, since they can't be achieved in low queue depth). And we're not getting any larger drives, because nobody is buying 8 TB drives - that have much worse price per TB than lower capacity drives - and are basically priced the same for the last half a decade, screw the progress?

But yeah, nobody needs more than "insert random number", because data hoarders are passe, everything is in a cloud now, nobody needs it for the larger photography / videography / audio projects, gaming is also not a good reason apparently...

 

[TheLostSwede]

€550-560 EUR for a 4 TB drive? Two years ago you could buy one for 170 EUR, and you can still buy an older PCIe 3.0, 4.0 drives at 210 - 220 EUR, and I bet without a stopwatch you could hardly tell a difference in real world applications, not benchmarks (program install and startup times, load times etc)...

If you think that is bad, the 4 TB SKU is listed by a Danish etailer for the equivalent of €655 and they want €360 for the 2 TB SKU...
For those that want to search for it, the full SKU name is: WDS400T1X0M-00CMT0

 

[L'Eliminateur]

Insane, i just checked optane prices and you can get a used(which is meaningless for optane)/pulled 400GB P5800X for ~480usd.

I's rather buy that anyday, it's big enough for os+game or a couple games and it's night and day

 

[PixelTech]

I think this is the last major manufacturer for m.2 drives to release a PCIe 5.0 drive. So we have full competition, but yet really high prices still. Sad.
Even as an PC gaming enthusiast the price is too high!
DirectStorage and equivalents haven't been adopted.

 

[evernessince]

Prices are getting out of control it seems. One would have thought that by now 16TB and 32TB SSD drives would have become mainstream (for the same prices as in the article), considering the latest size of the recent games, applications and stuff.

I expect this accounts for tariffs. I've been seeing some existing SSD and PSU SKUs shoot up in price recently too.

Insane, i just checked optane prices and you can get a used(which is meaningless for optane)/pulled 400GB P5800X for ~480usd.

I's rather buy that anyday, it's big enough for os+game or a couple games and it's night and day

You might want to buy while it lasts because pricing is going to go up across the board unless the trade war nonsense stops. Doesn't matter where you live.

I think this is the last major manufacturer for m.2 drives to release a PCIe 5.0 drive. So we have full competition, but yet really high prices still. Sad.
Even as an PC gaming enthusiast the price is too high!
DirectStorage and equivalents haven't been adopted.

Memory manufacturers have been caught consorting to control prices in the past. Simply having products in the market doesn't mean they are competing if they all use a similar pricing structure. Look at the monitor and GPU markets as examples. These companies are well aware that pricing around each other maintains margins.

 

[EsaT]

Interesting its still under WD branding even after the split.

Maybe they got schizophrenia and one half doesn't know what other is doing?

However by adopting the formatting chosen by Samsung they ended up with a lower number, and that gives off the wrong vibe, as if they're lowkey admitting their drive is slower/inferior.

In cameras model with shorter number designation is higher up in product stack.
Long numbers are there for marketing for people who don't know what they're buying. (besides brand)

Memory manufacturers have been caught consorting to control prices in the past.

And more than twice.

 

[docnorth]

I would guess that they were too far along the release schedule for this model to slam on the breaks and make it a SanDisk product.
Besides, there's already an SN7100.

WD Black SN7100 2 TB Review - The New Best SSD

The WD Black SN7100 2 TB SSD sets a new standard as the fastest Gen 4 SSD we've ever tested. It's also priced well and highly energy-efficient, which helps keep temperatures down. Fast, efficient, and affordable—the WD Black SN7100 hits all the marks.

www.techpowerup.com

You are right, I forgot about the 7100.

 

[Chaitanya]

Maybe they got schizophrenia and one half doesn't know what other is doing?

Or as pointed out above far too along in development cycles especially with certifications to make changes which would have increased costs and delayed release.

 

[BillA]

Interesting its still under WD branding even after the split.

Maybe they got schizophrenia and one half doesn't know what other is doing?

E.T. You made me laugh. APM

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