So today I'm going to talk about yet another PCIe Gen4 best budget SSD for gaming 2021, the Western Digital black SN850, which according to us in digital is supposed to be one of the fastest SSD on the market.
Now I have a 500 gigabyte and a one terabyte version here that will cost you around 135 and $230 respectively.
But there's also a two terabyte version available for which you will have to set aside $430. So yeah, it is on the expensive side of Gen4 drives.
So today, I'm going to compare it all to the other drives I managed to collect so far and see if these are worth their premium price.
Top Best budget ssd for gaming 2021
And I'm also not going to spoil the conclusion right away but if you were planning to buy this drive.
Keep on reading because some of the results will be pretty interesting.
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WD Black SN850 Best budget SSD for gaming
Now before we drive into the results. Let's take a look at how this drive is put together.
Now unfortunately Western Digital isn't sharing a lot of information about their design, but we can see that it uses their controller, a bit of DRAM cache, and their own three bits TLC flash memory.
It also applies the usual SSD caching for increased performance as long as you have a bit of free space available on your drive.
It also offers the usual five year-long warranty period, but they don't seem to think that you know hardware encryption is very important.
So if you want that you will have to look somewhere else Best budget ssd for gaming.
Now I do like to Western Digital puts all the components on one side, leaving the back of the PCB empty.
Which means that everything will be covered by a heatsink. And speaking of the heatsink so Western Digital sells this drive with a heatsink as well, but you will have to pay a bit more for that one.
And if you go for the one without a heatsink as I have right here, you will have to use a heatsink on your motherboard because it gets way too hot without it.
But I'll talk about that a bit later in this review. I also really liked that they kept the PCB black and the sticker. Nice and simple.
Now I know that you will never get to see it in your system but for those builds where you do see a part of it.
It is so much nicer to not have an ugly blue PCB shining through to experience all this drive has to offer you need to have a system with PCIe Gen4 support, which is a desktop computer with an AMD CPU and an X570, or a B550 motherboard.
And when it comes to Intel it will be supported by the upcoming Rocket League CPUs paired with some z590, and Z490 motherboards.
Now you can use it in other systems as well but then you won't get that full speed this drive has to offer. And you're probably just better off buying a cheaper Best budget SSD for a gaming pc 2021instead.
But let's see how does drive perform.
Test Rig-Best budget SSD for gaming
Now for my test rig, as usual, I use an asus ROG crosser eight hero motherboard with an AMD ryzen 959 50 x CPU and NFC crack in all in one cooler 32 gigabytes of 3600 megahertz Corsair Dominator Platinum memory and RTx 3080 GPU and an 850 watts Seasonic Prime titanium power supply.
The first tests were done on an open test bench, without a heatsink and any extra active cooling on them because I really do like to test the product as they come, and then see what difference does it make with some added cooling.
Sequential Performance
Now let's start with some sequential read and write speeds.
I don't think that these are so important unless all you do is copy files to and from really fast storage.
Those are the big fancy high numbers that most manufacturers love and use for their marketing so we might as well get them out of the way, right away.
When it comes to reading speeds, the SN 850 is the fastest drive into a chart, together with a coarser mp 600 Pro, it is slightly faster than the Samsung 980 Pro and significantly faster than all other Gen4 drives in the graph.
I did leave a couple of Gen three and SATA drives in the list as well as reference, but obviously, those cannot compete in pure transfer speeds in sequential writes the one terabyte sn 850 takes a good third place ahead of the 980 Pro, and it is only behind the mp 600 Pro SSD and the aura says for SSD raid setup.
The smaller sn 850 is a little bit behind, but still competitive with most larger Gen4 drives on the market so both of these are doing very well.
Best budget SSD for gaming PC Mark 10 - Light Use
But as I said before sequential speeds don't represent the actual performance in real-world scenarios.
And in my opinion, the PCMark 10 benchmark that has a bunch of different tests that are meant to replicate actual use cases is just a more reliable and a much more meaningful way to look at an SSD.
So I'm going to start with a PC Mark 10, the quick test which is a very light test because most of what we do with our systems is not that heavy on your Best budget SSD for gaming 2021.
It is mostly handled by the cache of the drive, not the main capacity. And that is exactly what this benchmark puts to the test.
Now both sn 50s do well here and they're pulling ahead of the competition by a very nice margin.
But as you can see there are some Gen3 drives near the top as well, which kind of shows that you won't notice the difference between a good Gen4 drive and a good gen three drive in these lights tasks.
PC Mark 10 - Heavier Use (OS Drive,Video Editors, etc)
And if we'll look at a full PC Mark 10 suite, which is a much more intense desk, that is meant to replicate a more serious active use of a drive so an OS Drive for your system for example, or as a scratch drive for your video editing rig.
And in my opinion, this is one of the most important benchmarks for a high-end drive. Now here both SSPs perform extremely well, leaving a nice gap between them and the competition.
And again, it is very interesting to see that some of the better Gen three drives are very competitive as well.
And that is a pretty accurate representation of what would you expect in a real-world scenario. Now just because it says Gen4 on some SSDs, it doesn't always make them better.
Fire! (Not really) Best budget SSD for gaming
So Western Digital did make a really fast drive. However, while it was being very fast. It was also getting hot.
Now do keep in mind most high-end controllers do get hot, so for example denied AT Pro got to run 90 degrees in my testing.
But this is an 850 hit 100 degrees onto controller within minutes of testing and for me, you know that just not comfortable to see.
Consistency Stress Test
It was also causing this drive to throttle in extreme scenarios.
So if we're looking at a PC Mark 10 consistency test which is an extremely heavy test that usually takes a day or two to complete the Western Digital dropped quite far from the top with a 980 Pro not being ahead by a big margin.
Adding a Heatsink
But do remember this wasn't an open desk band without any active cooling, which I would call is you know far from an ideal situation.
But at the same time, it is their design that allows us to drive to get this crazy hot in a less than ideal situation.
Unlike other drives that slow down, way before reaching these crazy temperatures which, you know, it's still okay but then I do think it's very important that it make it crystal clear on their website on their manual, and even on the box itself, that this drive needs some form of cooling.
I did another consistency test with a heatsink and some active cooling, and it did help.
It is now head to head with a 980 Pro but do keep in mind is a 980 did not need a heatsink nor airflow to get to this result so I do think it would pull ahead, even more.
If it had some cooling. I will include a retest of all best budget SSD for gaming 2021 as well with active cooling for a future post.
But with every consistency test-taking a few days, it will take quite a while to get that done.
I did a PC Mark 10 full and quick benchmarks with the cooling as well.
But as you can see that didn't make much of a difference right now so you won't feel the effect of cooling your drive in everyday performance.
But you know, considering how hot it gets you do want to cool your drive so it lives longer.
Final Thoughts
So overall I think Western Digital made an impressive drive first gen for us as these that launched a year and a half ago would reach high peak speeds, but they were not doing better than Gen three drives in more intense reroll tests, and this drive manages to pull ahead of its competitors in all real-world focus benchmarks.
But I would say there are still a few things to take into consideration and the first one is the high temperature.
So if you're buying this drive you need to make sure that you use a heatsink, and the drive has at least some airflow.
If you need hardware encryption you'll have to find an alternative as Western Digital did not include it. But I would say the biggest thing right now is the price per gigabyte of these drives is more than doubled another midrange best budget SSD for gaming 2021.
So for example, you can pick up a one terabyte sn 550 for the price of a 500-gigabyte sn 850, and still have some money left over.
And since most of the basic things that people need from an SSD like making sure your PC boots quickly or loading your games quickly will not feel much faster.
Taking a larger instead of a faster drive is just a better choice, in my opinion.
Now that being said the benefits of an extremely fast SSD should improve with Microsoft's direct storage technology, which should you know drastically change the way that faster SSD is the whole gaming experience.
But that is not out yet and I wouldn't recommend spending so much money today on a promise of a new technology that might come somewhere later this year.
But if you don't need encryption, and you're not looking for the best value and you just want that pure, pure performance.
It is really hard to argue with these benchmarks so it is fair to say that the Western Digital black sn 850 is the fastest Gen4 Best budget SSD for gaming on the market.
That's it for today, thank you so much for reading. I hope you enjoyed this review, if you did more click to subscribe bell icon to never miss a post.