Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Sandisk WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB is the middle capacity variant in the company's flagship PCIe 5.0-based NVMe SSD lineup. You can also get it in 1TB and 4TB capacities. The SN8100 series replaces the PCIe 4.0-based SN850X series, which in turn replaced the SN850 series. The SN8100 we are reviewing today does not come with a heatsink from the factory, but there is a heatsink version available. For this non-heatsink variant, you will get a sticker, as shown in our photo above. Cooling will depend on the heatsink that comes with your motherboard, or you can pick up something like the SilverStone TP05. The Sandisk WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB is physically compatible with the PlayStation 5, since the total thickness is below 11.25mm.
The WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB is an M.2 2280 format SSD. If you are not familiar with the M.2 physical standard, M.2 2280 means the size of the drive is 22mm by 80mm, hence its numerical designation. Its components are located on the black printed circuit board located behind the label, which we will take a closer look at in just a moment. The WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB works on the NVMe 2.0 logical device interface, and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, M.2 NVMe interfaces with PCIe 5.0. The SN8100 uses four lanes for up to 16,000MB/s bandwidth in each direction. The specified weight is a paltry 7.5g for this SSD.
Flip the Sandisk WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB around, and you will find no components of interest. The silkscreen labels on this side of the WD_BLACK SN8100 SSD are mainly regulatory certifications. Other than that, it is completely blank, as all the components are located on the other side. This SSD is made in China, which is the same as models like the SN850 1TB, SN770M 2TB, and SN770 1TB.
Remove the label and zoom in a bit, and you can see what the Sandisk WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB is made from. There are four key components that can be seen. At the heart of Sandisk's WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB is a Silicon Motion SM2508 labeled Sandisk A101-250800-AC. This is the same controller found in the Crucial T710 2TB. It is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to utilize the bandwidth afforded by the PCIe 5.0 standard. The SM2508 is built on TSMC's 6nm process, features a quad core ARM Cortex R8 CPU, eight NAND channels, and uses only 3.5W maximum in active mode. The controller also has native full drive encryption support. A Micron D8CJX, decoded as MT40A1G16TB-062E:F, DDR4-1600 2GB memory chip is present. It is used by the controller for system memory. SSD DRAM is used as a cache for writing data to the drive and storing a table that maps where each logical block address is physically located on the NAND flash memory. I am surprised to see DDR4 rather than LPDDR4 here, as the latter has better power efficiency.
The WD_BLACK SN8100's flash memory are Kioxia BiCS8 TLC 218-layer triple-level cells in two chips labeled Sandisk 025254 1100. Its rated write endurance is an excellent 1200TBW, which equates to about 660GB per day for five years. On a per-gigabyte level, it is the same as the Crucial T710 2TB, Crucial T500 2TB, Crucial P510 1TB, and WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB at 600TBW/TB, but much lower than drives like the Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB at 1000TBW/TB and Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 2TB at 1000TBW/TB. Its rated power consumption is not published. 48GB out of the 2048GB total capacity -- just under 3% -- is provisioned for the drive controller for overhead, so the actual usable space is 2TB, as advertised. You will see 1.81TB in Windows.
Specified at 14900MB/s read, 14000MB/s write, up to 2,300,000 IOPS read and 2,400,000 write over NVMe 2.0 on PCIe 5.0 x4, these figures are impressive for a flagship M.2 2280 model. It is about twice as fast as previous generation PCIe 4.0-based drives. To see how all this hardware translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit the SN8100 2TB against other performance NVMe-based SSDs from manufacturers like Crucial and XPG to see how this flagship PCIe 5.0-based drive steps up current generation SSDs in the next seven pages or so. Please note the Crucial T710 2TB was retested due to configuration changes, so the results in this review are not comparable to the results in the T710 review.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 265K
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-D15 G2 HBC
RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5-8400 2x24GB
Motherboard: ASUS ProArt Z890-Creator WiFi
Graphics: Integrated
Chassis: Fractal Design Epoch Black TG RGB Light Tint
Storage: Crucial T710 2TB, Crucial T500 2TB
Power: Seasonic PRIME TX-1300 ATX 3.0 1300W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Sandisk WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB
- Crucial T710 2TB
- XPG Mars 980 Blade 2TB
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
