WD Black PCIe NVMe SSDs Arrive For High-Performance PCs

Meet the WD Black PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe-based SSD that was just announced at CES 2017. This is Western Digital’s flagship consumer SSD and will be made available in the first half of 2017. WD Black PCIe SSDs will be available in 256GB and 512GB capacities with prices of $109.99 and $199.99, respectively. These prices put the cost per GB around $0.39 per GB on the WD Black PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe SSD. One of the nice features of the WD Black PCIe NVMe SSD series is that they are all single-sided devices and should fit into most any device that has an M.2 PCIe slot.

When it comes to performance, the WD Black PCIe NVMe SSDs have up to 2,050 MB/s sequential read speeds and up to 800 MB/s sequential write speeds. The Random 4K Read/Write performance is rated at up to 170,000 IOPS read and 134,000 IOPS write. WD has put a comprehensive thermal throttling & power management algorithms in plaec on the WD Black PCIe SSDs to prevent overheating and to maintain a consistent high performance level. WD backs the new Black PCIe NVMe series with a 5-year warranty and an 80 TBW rating on the 256GB model and a 160 TBW rating on the 512GB drive.

WD Black PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe SSD Series Performance, Endurance & Pricing:

We can’t wait to see how the WD Black PCIe NVMe SSD series performs in independent reviews as it is priced below the Samsung SSD 960 EVO series, but does have lower performance ratings on both the sequential and random speeds. More details can be found in the WD press release.