Customer Ratings & Reviews

This drive replaced a much earlier M.2 drive as the primary boot/os in a smaller gaming laptop, for me. Boot times into windows were not significantly8 changed, but the read and write speeds were definitely increased. WD Black is definitely a hallmark for performance, and this drive is no exception. On unboxing there aren't many bells and whistles, just the drive itself. I DO wish that they included the heatsink for all installations, but I acknowledge that most are not going to use it. Reported compatibility is very wide, including PS5s. Acronis true image is not included in the box, but is downloadable from Western Digital, and does a good job of migrating an OS or cloning a drive if that's something you're doing alongside this install. This drive is fast and seems reliable so far, I would recommend!

Just installed this drive on my laptop and they have super-fast read and write speeds. The installation is straightforward, pop in the SSD drive into the slot on motherboard and format and install windows. Note that the speed improvement will not be much if you don’t upgrade to PCIe Gen 4. There were no issues with my motherboard recognizing the hardwire and it was a worthy upgrade.

This drive is crazy fast. You may not notice the difference from a high end 3.0 drive, but going from an SATA SSD or even worse, a terrifying HDD will blow you away! I upgraded from a mid-top 1TB PCIE 3.0 NVME drive from a larger brand to this smaller 500gb 4.0 drive still resulted in BIG performance gains, hit almost spot on to manufacturers quoted speeds! I have an x570 board with 2 M.2 slots, so I moved the other drive to the second slot and used this one in the main slot. I did some quick crystal disk mark tests, version 8. Profiles were stock, changed test count to 2, and size to 1GB. 1TB 3.0 NVME drive WD SN850 500GB SEQ1MQ8T1 3281 MB/s / 2753 MB/s 7006 MB/s / 4169 MB/s SEQ1MQ1T1 2287 MB/s / 2565 MB/s 4424 MB/s / 4169 MB/s RND4KQ32T1 610 MB/s / 547 MB/s 750 MB/s / 678 MB/s RND4KQ1T1 65 MB/s / 193 MB/s 85 MB/s / 262 MB/s Even though this is a smaller drive (usually means slightly less performance) it destroyed the other drive in every test! From 24% faster on the slowest result all the way up to 113% faster on peak reads, pretty wild considering they're both very fast drives! If you have the means, and the platform to support it, go for the SN850!

The SN850 is a "Gen4 x4" SSD, so make sure you check your laptop's motherboard for compatibility! If you can not find the specs for your specific motherboard, you can check your pc's manual, it might not list the motherboard directly, but it still should have all the listed stats and compatibilities for the individual ports and components. If you go to the manufacturer support website for your computer, you should be able to download the manual from there. The SN850 is backwards compatible with older technologies, but keep in mind that you will NOT get the advertised max speeds on the box, your new SSD will only be able to reach the industry standards specified for older generation devices. I have a laptop that uses M.2 NVMe storage, and is around 6months old. I was expecting to have Gen4 SSD ports, but they are only Gen3 so while I wouldn't be able to reach the advertised 7GB read speeds, I wanted to future proof my purchase a little bit. My laptop was faster with the new SSD, but not as fast as a Gen4 device. My Laptop's read speeds jumped from 1700MBs to 3300MBs and my write speeds went from 420MBs to 3100MBs.It was definitely an upgrade, and it will still be useful if I get another computer in the next year.  If you are planning on making this your new C: drive, then make sure you have your Bitlocker recovery key ready, you can find this by logging into your Microsoft account. Even after cloning your drive over to the new SSD, the laptop will still ask you for the Bitlocker code for security purposes. However, before you get to that point you will have to format the new SSD as NTFS for a primary drive or FAT for other storage purposes. If after installing the physical drive, you do not see it with Windows Explorer, this is pretty normal. You will need to use Window's Disk Management or another storage management utility (there are lots of free utilities out there), to format it. Using Disk Management you will be able to see the new drive, and format it. Once it is formatted you can access the drive from Windows Explorer. If you go to the support page for the WD_Black SN850, you will be able to download "Acronis True Image for Western Digital", which is a great disk management utility. You can use Acronis to add a new drive or clone your old HD to the new one. You should also download the "Dashboard" program, as this will help monitor your new SSD. Dashboard can update the SSD software, and can turn on the "Game Mode" for enhanced performance. Dashboard is also great to keep track of the health and temperature of your new SSD. From the WD SN850 support page, you can get lots of installation tips and view troubleshooting issues. As I mentioned earlier your motherboard's design can affect read and write speeds, but so can other components, like the installed memory, internal temperatures and CPU, so keep all that in mind when looking at what kind of performance you will be expecting. Installation is usually very easy on most laptops as all you need to do is remove one screw, and a small panel. However some laptops require you to remove the entire bottom cover. Another word of caution, make sure you are grounded once the computer is opened, and before you touch the new SSD. There are devices you can buy to aid in static electricity prevention, but they are not always needed. There are plenty of websites out there to instruct on proper grounding while working on a laptop. Static electricity can actually damage delicate electronics such as these, so be careful. Installation took me a couple of minutes to physically install the drive and another couple to format it. It took about 15 minutes to clone my old drive to the new one, and I was done with everything in less than 30 minutes.  My laptop starts up and shuts down much quicker, and even runs all of my games much smoother. It's amazing how much quicker everything in general is. Overall this is an amazing piece of technology that can perform at irrational speeds, when placed into the right system, and can still provide outstanding performance in older devices, with it's backwards compatibility. With Western Digital's 3D NAND and it's stacking technology the SN850 can perform 1,000,000 IOPS which is close to twice the amount of the last generation's SSDs. To date, this is the fastest gaming SSD on the market.

Talk about breathing new life into a older computer!!!! I have a Intel NUC Skull Canyon bare bones computer that originally stuffed with a PCIe gen 2 M.2 drive and it rocked along okay but as technology improved it was slow in comparison to some laptops that I dropped PCIe gen 3 SSDs in. I was able to get my hands on the Western Digital WD_Black SN850 gen 4 drive to see if I could crank up the speed some. Installation was easy peasy! Pulled the bottom cover off the NUC and dropped the new SSD into the spare M.2 slot. I downloaded Acronis Image for Western Digital software from the Western Digital website. It was a simple extract and install. Once I launched the software it recognized the new WD hard drive and automatically provided a before and after configuration to verify that the correct drive was being cloned and the correct target was selected. Hit start and about 15 minutes later the old drive was successfully cloned. I planned on using the older drive for data storage so I left it in the NUC, launched Command Prompt with Admin rights and did a few partition removal commands to get the old drive scrubbed of all of the Windows created partition, formated it and got it ready for data. While I didn't run read/write tests to see how much faster the new drive was boot up was a bit faster and the NUC seems more snappy. I've resurrected several older laptops by dropping in 2.5" SSDs in place of the older mechanical hard drives and the difference is amazing. Switching from one SSD to another faster one did see some improvement but not as dramatic as HDD to SSD swaps but still worth it as drive costs drop. All in all I'm extremely happy with the new drive and most likely I'll yank it out of the NUC and install it in my next PC build. You can't go wrong with Western Digital and their line of SSDs. Very reliable and "knock on wood" I haven't had a drive failure in years. I highly recommend all Western Digital drives and especially their M.2 line that keeps getting better and better.

I picked this up for my new legion laptop. At the time It had the best price / performance I was looking for. You might read there was some slow downs with this drive but they released a firmware update for the drive. Overall this has been a fast very solid drive with no issues.

Very fast read speeds, but the highest advertised read speeds are sequential read speeds. I achieved 6018mb sequential read speeds The temps have been stable and no spikes which would be cause for concern. My operating system is loaded on it, that along with fast bootup option checked in the bios and my computer is up and running in 15seconds after being powered on. I love it!

This drive performs as advertised - but you must have a motherboard or computer capable of PCIE Gen 4, otherwise you'll only get about 1/3 of the speed (or less!). I was seeing speeds ranging from just a hair above and just a hair below the advertised of 7000 megabytes per/second read and 5300 megabytes per second write. FAST FAST FAST!

Using the cloning software from WD the unit cloned in under 4 minutes or less. To be honest I forgot to time it as it went by so quick. This gets very hot when cloning on a USB C port and suggest you find a slower speed to do the cloning process. Probably a USB 2.0 port will do the job. Registered the product by pulling the serial niumber off in the Dashboard software. Also update dashboard as this is a very useful drive monitoring app. Anyway I was surprised at the relative low cost for a super speed 4X4. Yes this is a 4 wheel drive drive! LOL Dashboard said I needed to uodate the FW but that function was disabled for some reason. Anyway this is a perfect boot drive and best use is to fresh install Windows Pro 64 if possible. If you can't do a fresh install the make a recovery drive so you can install fresh software later.

If you are looking for a gaming drive the SN850 should be at the top of your list! Load times are insane and the price is very competitive. This would also make a great primary drive for an OS but I have primarily used it for gaming.

You DO NOT need to buy a heat sink for this drive despite what other reviewers have written. It comes with a built in heat sink per tech support on this website.