WD_BLACK SN850 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch

AJA System Test

AJA System Test:

AJA System Test by AJA Video Systems measures system disk performance using video test files of different resolutions, sizes and codecs. We selected the standard 4K UltraHD resolution, a test file size of 1GB and the ProRes 4444 codec to see how this drive does with regard to video rendering performance. ProRes 4444 is used for heavy effects work and deep color projects. We changed the default test file size from 1GB to 16GB to better represent real-world usage. The results from this benchmark help content creators with regards to rendering expectations, throughput, file read/write expectations for transfers and that kind of thing.

Benchmark Results: The AJA System Test results on the WD_Black SN850 2TB SSD showed that it was capable of 5,096 MB/s read and 5,489 MB/s write speeds. The disk writes show many performance drops below 1500 MB/s, which is similar to what we saw with the write compression test in AS SSD Benchmark.

Despite the slightly wonky write results the WD_Black SN850 had the second highest write performance of any drive that we have tested along with the highest read performance of them all. That is pretty impressive considering we’ve run nearly three dozen 1TB and 2TB drives on this test system this year on the same Windows 10 image.