Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD Linux Performance

The high-end Intel Optane 900p was easily picking up some more wins in other demanding scenarios, but of the consumer PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs tested the WD_BLACK SN850 was a very strong performer. The SN850 also tended to deliver the best performance-per-dollar too.

The SN850 did get fairly warm -- spiking as high as 91 degrees, much higher than the peak temperature on the other drives tested. But the average temperature during all of these benchmarks for this 1TB drive was 58 degrees, just a few degrees warmer than the Corsair Force MP600 on average.

If taking the geometric mean of all the benchmark results, the WD_BLACK SN850 1TB managed to come out about 50% faster than the Corsair Force MP600 and Sabrenet Rocket 4.0 drives on Ubuntu Linux. Overall the WD_BLACK SN850 is an incredibly speed PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD consumer drive that for the 1TB capacity can currently be found retail for about $229 USD.

Those wanting to see how their own Linux system(s) compare to these EXT4 Linux SSD benchmarks on the different drives can install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 2011240-HA-SN850WDBL45.