By: Jonathan Kwan
September 26, 2025
About a year ago, a high school age girl from my church told me about how things got "really weird" between her and a guy at her school. As it turned out, she basically dated the guy for a few months, which included activities like hanging out at school every day, doing things as a couple, and talking on the phone until 3am every night. She actively denies having dated that guy, but if this is not dating, I do not know what is. In the end, she cut it off because the guy wanted to define the relationship, which turned her off and she was out. So is this a breakup? In my opinion, this was clearly a breakup, but her opinion is since she never claimed he was her boyfriend, it did not count. Many years ago, SanDisk and Western Digital were both storage giants in their own right, with SanDisk being known for USB flash drives, memory cards, and in the latter years, solid state drives, many of which I have reviewed here at APH Networks since 2006. Western Digital was known for their hard drives, which I have covered many models since 2014. In 2016, Western Digital bought SanDisk, which brought us an impressive portfolio of excellent SSDs under the WD_BLACK brand. As fate would have had it, the SanDisk brand resurrected this year, now stylized as "Sandisk", and became a separate entity. The new Sandisk is responsible for all flash memory products, even though the products still carry the WD branding. In fact, WD holds an equity stake in the new company, and even the WD CEO moved over to Sandisk. So is this a breakup, or is it not? I will leave that up to you to decide, just like the high school girl's relationship classification. But what is more important is whether or not they are still making some of the best products in the field. To find out, we took in a Sandisk WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB PCIe 5.0-based SSD for benchmarking. Read on to find out how it performs!
Our review unit of the Sandisk WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB arrived in a medium-sized brown corrugated cardboard shipping box from Precision Offset, a print shop in Tustin, California, USA. Tustin is a city in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The package arrived on our doorstep here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in excellent condition for our review today using FedEx International Ground.
Similar to other WD_BLACK series SSDs I have reviewed from the company like the Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB, the SN850 1TB came in retail packaging. Its retail box comes in a name-appropriate black and white color scheme. The company's branding can be seen subtly displayed in courier font in the background. In the foreground, you will find the product name and description at the top left corner in a more traditional font. It looks quite edgy for a traditional and conservative company like Western Digital, which is a great thing in my opinion. On top of it, you can see a 3/4 shot of the SSD itself. You can see its 1TB capacity specification and up to 7000MB/s rate read speed near the bottom right corner. Feature highlights and a list of contents can be found at the back of the box.
Before we move on, let us take a look at the specifications of the Sandisk WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB, as obtained from the manufacturer's website:
Capacity: 2TB
Form Factor: M.2 2280
Sequential Read Performance: 14900MB/s
Sequential Write Performance: 14000MB/s
Random Read: 2.3M IOPS
Random Write: 2.4M IOPS
Dimensions (L x W x H): 3.15" x 0.87" x 0.09"
Warranty: 5-Year Limited Warranty
Weight: 7.5gms
Operating Temperature: 0°C to 85°C
Non-Operating Temperature: -40°C to 85°C
Certifications: BSMI, CAN ICES-3(B)/NMB-3(B), CE, FCC, KCC, Morocco, RCM, TUV, UL, VCCI
Opening the box reveals the Sandisk WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB itself placed on a clear plastic tray. There is also a multi-language quick start poster that includes things like support resources and regulatory information. This is it -- out of the box, you will get nothing more than what you need. Not that we need them anyway, of course.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 9.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 11
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Conclusion
