WD Black lights up its SSD storage for gamers
The company's WD Black line of gaming storage achieves enlightenment.
WD brings gamers SSD upgrades -- to store all those 200-plus GB games coming down the pike -- with the RGB lighting they crave. The three new products in the company's WD Black family add some novelty to its NVMe: a bootable SSD RAID 0 array on an 8-bit PCIe 3 card, a Thunderbolt dock with up to 2TB of SSD built-in and an "irrationally fast" PCIe 4 NVMe drive.
The Windows-only AN1500 add-in card incorporates two NVMe SSDs configured as RAID 0 (for better performance) and claims read speeds up to 6,500MB/sec and write speeds up to 4,100MB/sec. WD says it's plug and play, and you can use it as a boot drive. It's backward compatible with PCIe 2 motherboards as well as PCIe 3.
Since it's on the PCIe bus, the card should deliver much higher bandwidth than an SATA SSD installed in a 2.5-inch bay, and at least based on specs it comes close to class-leading NVMe M.2 slotted SSD like the Samsung 980 Pro. It's more expensive, but if you don't have M.2 slots in your desktop it's a way to upgrade to faster storage than SATA.
The AN1500 is shipping now, and comes in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities with prices starting at $300.
Directly taking on 980 Pro-class NVMe, though, WD's offering the WD Black SN850 with similar specs, including PCIe 4 compatibility and up to 7,000MB/sec read and up to 5,300MB/sec write speeds. It comes in three capacities -- 500GB, 1TB and 2TB -- and in two versions. The standard stick is shipping this month starting at $130, while a version with a heatsink (so you can push performance a little more) and single-color RGB LED is slated for early 2021 for an as-yet unknown price.
A little more broadly intriguing, the WD Black D50 Game Dock SSD Thunderbolt dock includes 1TB or 2TB NVMe SSD along with a host of connections: two Thunderbolt 3, two USB-C, three USB-A, audio and a gigabit Ethernet jack. It can serve 87 watts for charging devices, including laptops , and has some blingy illumination as well. Plus, this one's Mac compatible.
WD rates the SSD in it at 3,000MB/sec read and 2,500MB/sec write, but that doesn't indicate the actual drive speed, since it's going through an external interface, like a portable drive. You can also get the D50 without any storage if you just want the illuminated dock.
It's shipping now, with prices starting at $500 with SSD and $320 without.