Up until last year, I never fully realized that PC gaming was such a big industry as my friends who have sons have repeatedly pointed out. The demands of gaming content have changed so that technology needs to keep up in order to get the gamers’ attention—and, of course, cash.
The Samsung 960 Pro has dominated the end-user, performance NVMe SSD market because of its excellent performance with an affordable price tag. But it seems to now have a worthy, if not equal, contender.
Western Digital Corp. recently introduced a high-performance Western Digital WD Black 3D NVMe SSD featuring the company’s proprietary SSD architecture and controller.
The drive accelerates data for PC applications to enable users to quickly access, engage and capture high-resolution video, audio and gaming content. These days, PCs need to have the capability to run intensive applications and enable 4K/Ultra HD graphics and video.
To move the immense amount of data quickly and seamlessly, Western Digital has developed a new breed of SSDs to help remove the traditional storage bottleneck. This M.2 drive features a new NVMe architecture and controller, which optimally integrates with Western Digital 3D NAND. The brand’s new vertically integrated SSD platform was engineered from the ground up, specifically architected to help maximize performance for NVMe SSDs, with advanced power management, durability and endurance for the growing range of applications benefiting from NVMe technology.
“Today’s gaming applications require increasing capability from their PCs, and this will only continue to advance. With our new architecture and controller, the Western Digital WD Black SSD integrates our 3D NAND technology with the NVMe interface to enable new levels of performance. Whether it’s a new gaming rig or a video-editing workstation, our innovative NVMe drives will power many existing and future environments that enable data to thrive,” said Mark Grace, senior vice president, Devices Business Unit, Western Digital.
Because I don’t know much about PCs (or even mobile gaming), I looked up the reviews online.
“The WD Black NVMe 1TB SSD has an endurance rating of 600 TBW when it comes to lifetime writes. That works out to meaning that you can write roughly 328.8 GB of data to the drive per day over the five-year limited warranty period. The Western Digital WD Black NVMe SSD series looks pretty much like any other M.2 2280 ‘gumstick’ drive. You have black PCB with a sticker covering all the major components,” said Nathan Kirsch in www.legitreviews.com.
“Leave it to the hard drive titan, Western Digital, to come up with a solid-state drive that goes toe-to-toe with Samsung’s best. Not only does the new WD Black NVMe SSD keep up with Samsung’s latest 970 Evo, but it’s also the fastest-writing drive we’ve ever tested,” said Kevin Lee in www.techradar.com.
With exceptional sequential read (up to 3,400 MB/s for the 1TB and 500GB model) and write performance (up to 2,8001MB/s for 1TB model) combined with up to 1TB capacities, the new drive is ideal for enhancing user experiences in gaming environments. The drives feature up to 500,000 random-read IOPs (for 1TB model) to deliver extreme throughput, which is ideal for multi-threaded applications and data-intensive multitasking environments. The Western Digital WD Black 3D NVMeSSD is available in the Philippines in capacities of 250GB (P4,900), 500GB (P9100) and 1TB (P20,000).
The new drives are available in select Western Digital retailers, e-tailers, resellers, system integrators and distributors.