WD’s SN850x NVMe SSD is an RPS mainstay, having been named the best PCIe 4.0 SSD in our evergreen gaming SSD recommendations, thanks to its extremely quick game loads and generally excellent performance.
It’s also frequently discounted, but not normally to the extremes of today – where a 4TB drive is available for just $230 at Amazon US, versus the $286 it normally costs and the $449 (!) it cost at the start of the year.
In terms of speeds and feeds, the SN850x in its 4TB incarnation is rated for a maximum read speed of 7300MB/s, approaching the very limits of the PCIe 4.0 interface, with max writes of 6600MB/s. Random speeds, which are a better indicator of real-world performance in tasks like loading games or apps, are also basically off the charts at up to 1.2M IOPS reads and 1.1M IOPS writes. For context, even the best PCIe 3.0 SSD topped out at half that.
This is one of the very best SSDs on the market, so being able to pick it up in such a huge capacity for $230 is pretty special.
