If you're anything like me, you probably don't enjoy spending money on PC upgrades, but sometimes, it's less of a luxury and more of a necessity. Most SSDs I've used over the years, both PCIe Gen 3 and 4, never actually died, but one that did had me feeling more conscious of my storage.
I was firmly in the "PCIe 4.0 is fast enough" camp when WD_BLACK offered its Gen 5 SN8100 NVMe SSD, but sure enough, it almost doubled the performance of the Gen 4 Samsung 990 PRO acting as my Windows 11 boot drive.
It was, however, a little too expensive at launch, so anyone looking for Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals should consider it now that it's dropped to under $210 at Amazon with a Prime membership. 2TB is plenty, too, or at least it always felt that way.. not sure if 2TB is becoming the new normal(?)
Heatsink required, not just recommended
If you're building (or recently built) a gaming desktop PC with a PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD slot, you probably entertained the idea of picking up a compatible storage drive before noticing how hilariously expensive they are. I know I did, but the proof of how fast these WD_BLACK SN8100 drives can be is almost completely justified by a better "dollar per MB/s" value than my PCIe Gen 4 champion, the Samsung 990 PRO.
Yes, that's 14MB per second. It's a significant jump with the new PCIe generation, but it doesn't come without a trade-off. When the WD_BLACK SN8100 is under stress, say, when installing a game, it gets hot.
I know WD_BLACK says you can, but do not use this SSD without a heatsink. That's my tip.
Plenty of motherboards come with an SSD heatsink these days, but if you haven't finalized your component choices yet, make sure you choose one that does. It's not like it won't work at all, but keeping the temperatures under control ensures that the SN8100 doesn't have to throttle its speeds to maintain healthy operation.
Specification | WD_BLACK SN8100 |
|---|---|
Capacity | 2TB |
Interface | PCIe 5.0 x4, NVMe 2,0 |
Sequential read | Up to 14,900 MB/s |
Sequential write | Up to 14,000 MB/s |
Form factor | M.2 2280 |
Oh hey, my motherboard is on sale, too
Yep, if you wanted to be a complete copycat and just build the same PC as mine, you could spring for the previously reviewed ASUS ROG STRIX B650-A GAMING WIFI while it's enjoying a similar discount for Amazon Prime Day.
Originally, I used it to test the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D and, later, to run its successor, the 9800X3D, and it's still going strong. The SSD heatsink has been through a lot, too, as I keep swapping it out to change M.2 drives for data transfer and testing, but it keeps the temperatures lower, and I've never suffered any noticeable data slowdowns.
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