Western Digital Reveals WD Black PCIe SSDs

Since acquiring SanDisk, Western Digital has started making inroads into the SSD market. Last year, they launched the WD Green and WD Blue series of SSDs which were partially based on existing SanDisk drives. Now the hard drive giant is venturing into the unknown with their first PCIe SSDs, the WD Black. While the PCIe SSD market is known for hosting the bleeding edge performance segment, Western Digital is targeting the more budget oriented users first.

The drives come in at 256GB and 512GB capacities for $109 and $199.99 respectively which is a major bargain for a PCIe SSD. In fact, they have among the lowest MSRP and may even be the cheapest once they hit the market and see some sales. While the drives do carry a massive 5-year warranty, they have a relatively low 80 TB and 160 TB write endurance ratings. The drives are expected to arrive sometime within the first half of 2017.

In terms of performance specifications, the drives have a sequential read speed of 2050 MB/s while reads are 700 MB/s and 800 MB/s for the 256GB and 512GB respectively. 4K read IOPS are the same at 160K while writes are 130K and 134K respectively. Power draw is a bit high at 8.25W but that is somewhat expected given the reported use of 15nm TLC. The controller most likely is the Marvell 88SS1093, the same used for the Plextor M8Se but with a different firmware of course.