For some time now we have seen a really interesting evolution in SSDs in terms of pure performance, where it has gone from 560 MB/s of SATA 3 to more than 7 GB/s of the new NVMe. But this has not really meant a change in the games as such beyond exporting very large textures in less time, what about the rest? WD just introduced its Black SN850Xthe first SSD that could change the paradigm of PC games by improving its performance.
No transfers or sequential returns live companies and players. IOPS, latencies, and thermal management are even more important factors when looking for sustained performance. A momentary peak is worth nothing when you have to spend hours playing. Western Digital knows this and hence the new technology that it has implemented in its new solid state drive was born.
WD_Black SN850X, two technologies that can change everything
Although it is obvious that WD is going all out with this new high-performance drive, the improvements are not so much on the speed side as they are on the optimization of key sections. So we find this WD_Black SN850X an NVMe M.2 2280 SSD under PCIe 4.0 which represents an improvement of 300 MB / s compared to its predecessor «no X» achieving a sequential read of up to 7,300MB/s.
This is possible thanks to the new NAND Flash BICS5 (TLC) already a new controller 8 channels created by Western Digital itself, where at the same time the company has provided this SSD with a new DRAM cache that is faster. There are no more details here because the company has not wanted to show all its cards, since what this SSD integrates could change, if not totally, at least partially the market for solid state drives as we know it in high performance.
Predictive charging and advanced thermal management
This SN850X SSD will include a high-performance heatsink matched to its heat generation along with three key enhancements to increase gaming performance and address key areas where others fail: minimized latency, predictive load and adaptive thermal management.
The company speaks of a minimized latency where lower access times are now more important and higher ones are reduced. These range from 0 ms to just over 5mswhere the SN850X manages to outperform both its predecessor and the competition.
Regarding loading times, Western Digital offers an improvement result of no less than 18%, which will translate not only into the obvious, but will also achieve faster import and export of textures both to RAM as to the VRAM of the GPU.
Finally, we talk about adaptive thermal management, about which we really know little and it is more than likely that it is an algorithm that calculates in real time the load of the DRAM controller and the temperature of the NAND Flash chips, varying the load in nanoseconds. of work between the chips, which together with its new invoice heatsink provide more sustainability in the performance mentioned above.
The price of this wonder is $189 for the version of 1TBbut later versions of 2TB and 4TB whose price is unknown. As for the availability date, there is no such thing beyond that they will arrive throughout this summer. It should be added that there will be a version with heatsink and without heatsinkso this will also affect the price, which has also not been revealed.
