Western Digital today unveiled a series of new products under its WD_BLACK portfolio of storage solutions in an official online one-of-a-kind launch event. Officially launched in India today, these products were actually shown in an event streamed on Twitch in early October, 2020.
The headlining products are the WD_BLACK SN850 series of PCIe NVMe solid state drives and the WD_BLACK AN1500 NVMe Add-in-Card.
WD Black SN850 PCIe Gen4 SSD
The SN850 series is an upgrade from the previous year’s SN750 NVMe drives. It supports PCIe Gen4 technology and is claimed to deliver read/write speeds up to 7000/5300 MB/s. It features Western Digital’s all new second generation controller. Currently, Western Digital has announced only the M.2 NVMe SSD, and an upcoming version that will feature a heatsink, just like in the SN750 Black Edition, is expected to launch soon. This is also touted to feature RGB lighting. The SN850 will be available in capacities from 500GB to 2TB. The new series is already live on Amazon.
WD Black AN1500 SSD: PCIe Gen4 Performance for Gen3 Machines
A first for Western Digital, and a rather interesting product, the WD Black AN1500 is a PCIe 3 x8 add-in card SSD that delivers Gen4 performance for gamers on desktops that only support PCIe Gen3 speeds. The AN1500 features two of their SN730 SSDs in RAID-0 configuration for increased performance. The AN1500 uses the Marvell 88NR2241 NVMe RAID chip. Owing to the hardware RAID capability, the AN1500 acts as a single drive, offering read speeds of 6.5GB/s and write speeds of 4.1GB/s. Since the AN1500 uses two drives, the available capacities are also doubled. The smallest capacity being 1TB and the largest being 4TB. The AN1500 comes with a aluminium heatsink and backplate, matching the design philosophy of recent WD_BLACK products. It also features RGB lighting.
The WD Black AN1500 is the first of its kind product, being the first consumer NVMe SSD capable of using 8-lane interface without the trouble of using software RAID, or manually configuring two same drives in RAID. The AN1500 can obviously be used in PCIe x4 slot, but will take a performance hit if that is the case.
WD Black P10 Game Drive, P10 Game Drive for Xbox and P50 External SSD Drives for Next-Gen Consoles, Desktops and Laptops
Western Digital also launched new products for console gamers. The WD Black P50 Game Drive SSD offers read speeds of up to 2000MB/s and up to 2TB of storage. It comes with WD’s SuperSpeed USB interface that supports pathways of up to 20GB/s.
The WD Black P10 Game Drive is an external HDD meant for next-gen consoles, laptops and PC, available in capacities up to a maximum of 5TB. It is really nifty in size and be carried in a pocket. It is based on the USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface, and weighs 140 grams for the 2TB model and 230 grams for the 4TB and 5TB models. It supports PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox One, Windows and Mac OSX.
