WD BLACK PCIe SSD Review: A Perfect Drive for Professionals and Gamers to Boost PC Performance

The next-generation WD Black PCIe M.2 NVMe-based SSD comes a little late in the market, but with unique features, superb read speed and at an affordable price.

The M.2 SSD is built for high-performance PCs and ultra-slim laptops. Having the sequential read speeds up to 2050MB/s, the WD Black PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe-based SSD unlocks a new level of performance, three times faster speed than a SATA SSD.

It is built for high-performance PC users working with high-definition video, applications, virtual augmented reality, streaming and real-time analytics, resource-intensive video games, software for CAD and other software products impose high requirements on the system.

Detailed Specification

Capacity: 512GB, 256GB

Interface: PCIe Gen3 8 Gb/s

Form Factor: M.2 2280

Sequential Read/Write:

512GB

• Up to 2,050 MB/s Read
• Up to 800 MB/s Write

256GB

• Up to 2,050 MB/s Read
• Up to 700 MB/s Write

Sleek and small M.2 Form factor

The next-gen WD Black PCIe SSD is made in M.2 2280 form factor making it quite slim and small like a stick. It has PCIe Gen3 8 Gb/s interface. On the top, it houses DRAM, NAND, and controller covered by a sticker with product information and branding. It is a single sided SSD, thus the other side is blank.

Fast Yet reliable

The drive comes in two variants – 256GB and 512GB. It has thermal throttling & power management algorithms that prevent overheating and maintain high performance. Moreover, it offers 1.75M hours Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) and several leading error-correction technologies, which means you can rely on the drive without any worry.

WD offers two free software - WD SSD Dashboard and Acronis True Image WD Edition Software, available for download on WD website. WD SSD Dashboard helps you to monitor the health of the drive. Using the Acronis True Image WD Edition Software, you can clone your drives to the cloud to secure your data from any unwanted damages.

Ideal for almost any PC

The thin single-sided M.2 design makes it an ideal drive to install on almost any PC or laptop. It is certified by WD F.I.T. Lab meaning, it is compatible with a wide range of high-performance PC configurations. SO, it can be used on your tower PC as well as in a modern ultra-thin laptop.

In case your PC has previous generation motherboard that doesn't have an M.2 port, you can install it in a PCIe card and then on your PC. Also, you can use it as an external drive, by adding it in an external M.2 SSD casing, if you are seriously looking for a reliable external drive to keep your precious data secure.

Extremely Fast

WD claims the sequential read/write speed of the SSD is up to 2,050/800 MB/s. We tested the drive on our test bench bed (Intel Core i7 CPU, 4 GB Kingston DDR3 RAM, Windows 10 OS and Cooler Master 350 Plus).

In our random test in which we transferred the assorted 5GB data (Video, PDF, word and other files) from our HDD drive to the WD SSD drive, it took only 1 min 44 sec. While transferring same data from WD drive to PC drive it took about 2 min 17 sec. On the other hand, when I transferred 1GB movie to the drive, it took only 15 sec.

Running the synthetic benchmarks, to identifying the key strengths and weaknesses of a drive. It performed really well on Crystal Disk Mark (sequential) and resulted in 1526 MB/s read and 822 MB/s write speed.

Using the HD Tune Pro, it delivered maximum and minimum read speeds of 572.9 MB/s and 335.6 MB/s respectively.

Benchmarking random access, resulted in 18052 IOPS operation/sec, 0.055 ms avg. access time, 1.050 ms max. access time, and 8.815 MB/s avg. speed.

In the 4KB file transfer sequential benchmark, it delivered 970851 KB/sec read and 729452 KB/sec write speed.

The AS SSD benchmarking (sequential) was also splendid, 1248.98 MB/s read, 701.29 MB/s write.

Using the copy benchmark, it delivered -
ISO 595.59 MB/s speed
Program 207.19 MB/s speed
Game 362.06 MB/s speed

Other Benchmarks

Real life performance

To test its real-life performance, I installed Windows 10 on this drive and added all the essential software including Adobe Photoshop, MS-Office, etc. The boot time of the machine was boosted from 25 secs to 9 sec. While working on the PC, I experienced faster app loading as well.

While considering gaming, there also, it boosted the overall PC performance. I installed Thief and Need for Speed games on the machine. The gaming operation was quite smooth with great rendering and amazing performance. Playing games like 'The Hobbit' was an amazing experience on the machine using the drive. It boosted the rendering speed as well as the enhanced overall gaming performance.