WD Introduces PCIe SSD

Western Digital has announced its first PCIe SSD for the consumer market. It is an NVME model for the budget segment that the company has called the WD Black PCIe SSD. It can be supplied in two capacities.

The WD Black PCIe SSD can be supplied with 256GB or 512GB and in both cases has a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. The SSDs use the NVME interface and both have a maximum sequential read speed of up to 2050MB/s. The maximum write speed of the 512GB version is 800MB/s and that of the 256GB version is 700MB/s. Western Digital did not disclose which components the ssds are made with, but did say that it is a budget drive that should be slightly more expensive than Intel’s nvme m2 budget ssd, the 600p.

Further specifications for the Black SSD speak of a random read performance of 170,000iops and 130,000iops or 134,000iops at write for the 256GB and 512GB versions respectively. The SSDs have a warranty of five years or 80TB or 160TB of stored data. According to WD, they are relatively energy efficient with a maximum consumption of 8.25W and an idle consumption of 5.5mW. With a plug-in card, thermal throttling shouldn’t be a problem, but WD nevertheless claims to have included special thermal management algorithms in its firmware that should prevent reduced performance when warming up.