WD_BLACK SN8100 NVMe PCIe Gen 5 SSD Review – Professional-Grade NVMe storage that delivers

The WD_BLACK SN8100 NVMe Gen 5 SSD promises PCIe Gen 5 performance with speeds up to 14,900 MB/s, positioning itself as a premium storage solution for gaming and content creation. After testing the 2TB model, I can confirm this drive delivers on its performance claims while maintaining reasonable power efficiency for a Gen 5 SSD.

Gen 5 NVMe SSD is definitely on the rise as I have reviewed two in the past couple of weeks from various manufacturers and there will be more to come.

While PCIe Gen 5 storage is still relatively new territory, the SN8100 represents WD’s serious attempt to capture the high-performance market. But does it justify the premium price, and more importantly, will you actually notice the difference in real-world usage?

Unboxing and First Impressions

The WD_BLACK SN8100 review unit I have is the 2 TB model without the integrated heatsink and looks premium.

For laptop users, the non-heatsink version maintains the standard M.2 2280 form factor at just 7.5 grams of weight, making it suitable for ultra-thin laptops that support PCIe Gen 5. However, thermal management becomes more critical without the heatsink, particularly during sustained workloads.

Performance That Actually Matters

The speed on paper are impressive: sequential read speeds up to 14,900 MB/s and write speeds up to 11,000 MB/s for the 2 TB model. In synthetic benchmarks, the SN8100 consistently delivered speeds close to these figures, often exceeding 14,000 MB/s in sequential reads. Note that you need to have a motherboard that supports running Gen 5 to be able to utilise this speed like my GIGABYTE Z790 AERO G. If you don’t, you can still use it but the speed will be limited to Gen 4 speed.

CrystalDiskMark with random data:

But here’s where it gets interesting – the real-world performance differences compared to a high-end PCIe Gen 4 drive are less dramatic than the numbers suggest. It’s not the WD_BLACK SN8100’s fault per se, as this is also the case for any other Gen 5 drives.

Loading games with big map data or transferring large video files showed improvements, but we’re talking about seconds rather than minutes of time saved even though the read speed of a Gen 5 drive is almost twice than a Gen 4.

Where the SN8100 truly shines is in professional workloads for content creation like video editing. Video editing with 4K footage, particularly when working with multiple streams simultaneously, showed noticeable improvements in timeline scrubbing and export times. The drive’s random performance figures of over 2.3 million IOPS translate to snappier system responsiveness when handling multiple applications.

I was editing some 4K video clips that I’ve transferred from my iPhone 15 Pro and editing these over 30 clips were a breeze with the WD_BLACK SN8100.

Power Efficiency and Thermal Management

One area where the SN8100 genuinely impresses is power efficiency. WD claims industry-leading efficiency for PCIe Gen 5, and the numbers support this. The drive averages around 7W during operation, which is reasonable for a Gen 5 SSD delivering these performance levels.

An integrated heatsink would work more effectively at managing temperatures but even without the heatsink, temperatures were pretty stable for day to day use like playing Stellar Blade that I’m reviewing, other AAA games, or just transferring files here and there. Only when you are doing intensive workloads for a continuous period of time that you may run into some thermal throttling.

Temperature while playing Overwatch 2 for a couple of hours:

It does get warmer when I ran the CrystalDiskMark three times consecutively – but benchmarking software is always taxing and in most cases, this is something that you won’t be experiencing often – or ever.

Endurance and Reliability

With up to 2,400 TBW endurance for the 4TB model (and 1,200 TBW for the 2TB model), the SN8100 should handle years of intensive use. The 1TB model has a 600 TBW endurance which translates to approximately 300GB of writes per day for five years – more than sufficient for most users.

The five-year warranty provides peace of mind, and WD’s track record with enterprise storage suggests the SN8100 should prove reliable in long-term use. I’m still using the WD_BLACK SN850X for the past three years as my primary gaming drive and never have issues.

The inclusion of TCG Opal encryption support adds another layer of data protection for security-conscious users.

WD_BLACK SN8100 Review Conclusion

The WD_BLACK SN8100 NVMe Gen 5 SSD represents genuine progress in storage performance, delivering speeds that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. The drive consistently achieves its claimed performance figures while maintaining reasonable power efficiency and thermal characteristics, even without a heatsink. However, if you are going to use the drive heavily like running big workload consistently for a period of time, you might want to wait a bit for the heatsink version (which is coming to Australia in a few months time).

However, the real-world benefits depend heavily on your use case. Content creators, professionals working with large datasets, editing 4K or 8K videos, and users building high-end systems will appreciate the performance gains. For general gaming and productivity, the improvements are less dramatic but still noticeable.

The build quality feels premium and WD’s reputation for reliability with a five-year warranty provide confidence in long-term ownership.

At current pricing, the SN8100 sits firmly in the premium storage category. If you’re building a cutting-edge system and want the fastest storage available, the SN8100 delivers. For users on tighter budgets or those with less demanding workloads, a high-quality PCIe Gen 4 drive like the SN850X or SN850 might offer better value.

The WD_BLACK SN8100 NVMe SSD is available for purchase at shop.sandisk.com/en-au/ and select retailers in 1TB ($329.00 AU MSRP), 2TB ($499.00 AU MSRP) and 4TB2 ($899.00 AUMSRP) capacities. The WD_BLACK SN8100 NVMe with Heatsink will be available starting October 2025. Also available at Amazon.com

Disclosure: WD_BLACK SN8100 review sample was supplied for reviewing