WD_BLACK SN850 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD Review

Large File Transfer and Backup File Read

Real World File Transfer

Let’s see how real-world performance was when writing a movie folder containing seven 1080P movies over to the SSD. For this test, we are going to measure write performance by copying a 30.6GB folder of movies off from the drive being tested back to itself to see how performance looks. This action is basically a long linear sequential write operation and punishes the SLC Cache on many drives.

When it comes to writing a bunch of data to the drive without any breaks, the WD_Black SN850 2TB drive finished with an average speed of 1931.4 MB/s. The Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB SSD was 4.8% quicker in this benchmark, but you can see the new PCIe Gen4 drives that have been released in the second half of 2020 come in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place.

CustomRead File Test

The next custom test that we are going to do is how fast each drive can read a compressed folder. For this we backed up a Steam copy of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds for the test file. The compressed folder contains 59 titles and is 27.3 GB (29,409,916,771 bytes) in size.

When it comes to reading a compressed Steam Backup file the WD_Black SN850 finished the task at a speed of 2216.0 MB/s! That puts it in 4th place against all the other drives that we have tested, but the performance gap between the 980 PRO and SN850 was close!