The Western Digital SN5000 is a solid-state drive in the M.2 2280 form factor, launched in June 2024. It is only available in the 4 TB capacity listed on this page. With the rest of the system, the Western Digital SN5000 interfaces using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection. The SSD controller is the Polaris 3 A101-000172-A1 from WD, a DRAM cache is not available. Western Digital has installed 162-layer QLC NAND flash on the SN5000, 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. Copying data out of the SLC cache (folding) completes at 544 MB/s. Thanks to support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface, performance is excellent. The SN5000 is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 5,500 MB/s and 5,000 MB/s write; random IO reaches 690K IOPS for read and 900K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 289 USD. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Western Digital guarantees an endurance rating of 1200 TBW, a relatively low value compared to other SSDs.