Our top pick for gaming should be your next primary SSD.
The WD Black SN850x is ourtop SSD pick for PC gaming, offering some of the fastest load times we’ve ever recorded - so I thought I’d let you know that the 1TB size of the drive has dropped to £47.99 on Ebay when you use codeAPPLY20at the checkout. That’s a tiny fraction of the drive’s original RRP and the lowest price we’ve ever recorded for this size. All told, it’s a hugely impressive deal.
The WD SN850x is a top-tier PCIe 4.0 SSD, so you’ll need a laptop or motherboard that supports this version of the PCIe spec (or the later PCIe 5.0 spec) to use it at full speed. That includes most motherboards made in the last three or four years, including AMD’s B550, B650, X570 and X670 series and Intel’s Z490, Z590, Z690 and Z790 series motherboards (and most corresponding B and H-series boards too - consult Google with the model name of your motherboard and the search term “PCIe” to be sure; manufacturer websites and product listings are the best places to confirm this).
The SN850x is also a great fit for PS5, easily surpassing Sony’s speed requirements, but the company does recommendan NVMe heatsinkfor use in the small PS5 expansion enclosure.
With a suitable motherboard or laptop in place, you’ll enjoy speeds up to 7300MB/s reads and 6600MB/s writes, plus around 800K IOPS in random reads - all of which puts the SN850x amongst the Samsung 990 Pro and a very small cadre of competing SSDs in offering these sorts of speeds.
Here’s what we said about the SN850x in our write-up:
So - it’s a great drive at a great price, do pick one up!
