Beating even some PCIe 5.0 drives in our random 4K performance benchmark, this M.2 SSD is definitely up to the challenge of braving your Steam
backlog. Write speeds are comparatively average, though.
Key specs: NVMe | PCIe 4.0 | Up to 7250 MB/s read speed | Up to 6900 MB/s write speed | Single-sided
Hollow Knight: Silksong crashed the Steam store when it was finally released yesterday. This indie darling's very approachable system requirements offer one clue as to why; lots of people want to play it and, thanks to the fact that a 10-year-old Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 GPU is what features under the recommended specs, a lot of folks with ancient rigs can.
won't take up masses of room either, with a frankly spindly file size of only about 8 GB—but that doesn't mean I'm not still in the market to expand my internal storage. Besides Team Cherry's latest, I've got a long list of both AAA and indie titles to get through before Game of the Year season rolls around once more—though I'm struggling to find the space to do it (never mind the time). Thankfully, Sandisk's WD_Black SN7100 NVMe SSD is enjoying a price cut, with .
The WD_Black SN7100 holds the title of for a number of good reasons, with a nearly $40 discount on the 2 TB model being just the most recent addition to an already robust list.
Now, to be clear, the WD_Black SN7100 is a last-gen PCIe 4.0 drive, but it's far from slow by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, in his betdog earlier this year, Zak wrote, "It absolutely demolished every drive I've tested on the read front, scoring an insane 101 MB/s. For context, the second fastest drive I've had on test, Crucial's PCIe 5.0 2 TB T700, only managed 81 MB/s there."
To beat a PCIe 5.0 drive is impressive, but perhaps unsurprising when you take a peek under the hood—or, well, the heat sink, I guess. The WD_Black SN7100 owes some of its speed to Kioxia 218-Layer BiCS8 TLC NAND flash memory it's packing, which is also featured in our favourite PCIe 5.0 drive, the . So, to massively oversimplify, it's reading at speeds comparable to the latest generation of drives because it's rocking tech actively used by Gen5 drives.
That said, while Zak describes the WD Black SN7100 as having "best in class 4K read performance," he also notes that when it came to write speeds, the drive fell comparatively short. He writes, "landing just 276 MB/s [on the write portion of the random 4K performance benchmark], even the [beats] it by a healthy margin of 22 MB/s."
So on the one hand, yeah, it might take a bit of time to get sbfplay your games moved over to this drive. However, once they're there, you won't be left waiting around if, like me, you're desperate to battle this year's backlog of absolute corkers.
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1. Best overall:
2. Best budget:
3. Best PCIe 5.0:
4. Best budget PCIe 5.0:
5. Best 4 TB:
6. Best 8 TB:
7. Best M.2 2230:
8. Best for PS5:
9. Best SATA: