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Western Digital Black

11owners with an opinion
60%of verdicts positive
0/2positive/negative since 2024
5 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability.

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Likes itOwned 5 yearsStill going
The recent issues with Samsung's SSD's don't help with those feelings I'm sure. I have a WD-Black 1TB SSD in my system that I built in 2018 and I used it heavily all day long and I have not suffered any issues from the SSD. I also used a MacBook Pro from early 2013 and only recently sold it still going strong with it's SSD (proprietary). I read recently that some HDD were starting to have reliability problems after a few years.
Doesn’t like it
I've had a lot of nvme form factor drives (whether in a usb stick or das or on my motherboard) fail in the last 5 years. I assume heat. I have one of the fastest 2tb usb sticks you can get and it gets super hot in the aluminum case its in and that drive only lasted me a year. My tiny little 2tb only-used-for-time-machine drive i bought with my m1 max died years ago. I have a $1200 (now) msrp 4tb wd black i used for a month before it completely died. I don't think i have a single working usb stick right now out of probably 5 of them. I have 4-6 samsung 970-990 pros none of those have died.
Doesn’t like it
I keep on having issues with my WD SN850 dropping offline and coming back R/O but it still fails to produce any reads and my system still crashes. I've applied all the pcie power management fixes on the kernel command line and still having problems. That sounds similar to what you describe. It starts off with vscode disappearing, then UI locks, and then it dumps me to a virtual console spitting kernel errors for a bit. The nvme drive itself reports no media errors so I really do think it's a system side problem with the pcie controllers...
Neutral
The last time I booted to a windows drive on my prior desktop was to update the firmware on a Samsung NVME SSD drive to prevent premature failure. Was kind of a pain for even that task as I hadn't been running Windows for about a year at that point... in fact my insiders build of windows was so out of sync it wouldn't even update anymore. Meh. Since then I've been using Corsair and WD Black drives, since Samsung has gotten overpriced and hasn't seemed as reliable the past few years. That application was one of the reasons.
Neutral
God this site is cancer on phone, I'm reading the article and suddenly the whole screen is full of some signup crap and the onscreen keyboard, so I try to bail and no fewer than 3 times does it prevent me from swiping back. Serves me right for not browsing on desktop... Anyway, back to the topic: the 8 TB SN850X I bought for 530 Eur is now 1k Eur from some random eBay listing, not very trustworthy: https://geizhals.de/western-digital-wd-black-sn850x-nvme-ssd...
Neutral
> For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing. The last one were I really remember seeing a huge speed bump was going from a regular SSD to a NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD... Around 2015 I bought one of the very first consumer motherboard with a NVMe M.2 slot and put a Samsung 950 Pro in it: that was quite something (now I was upgrading the entire machine, not just the SSD, so there's that too). Before that I don't remember when I switched from SATA HDD to SATA SSD. I'm now running one of those WD SN850X Black NVMe SSD but my good old trusty, now ten years old, Samsung 950 Pro is still kicking (in the wife's PC). There's likely even better out there and they're easy to find: they're still reasonably priced. As for my 2015 Core i7-6700K: it's happily running Proxmox and Docker (but not always on). Even consumer parts are exceptionally reliable: the last two failures I remember, in 15 years (and I've got lots of machines running), are a desktop PSU (replaced by a Be Quiet! one), a no-name NVMe SSD and a laptop's battery. Oh and my MacBook Air M1's screen died overnight for no reason after precisely 13 months, when I had a warranty of 12 months, (some refer to it as the "bendgate") but that's because first gen MacBook Air M1 were indescribable pieces of fragile shit. I think Apple got their act together and came up with better screens in later models. Don't worry too much: PCs are quite reliable things. And us…
Neutral
Unfortunately got some experience with that... Busy getting my new build together so today I bought a 8 Tb WD Black 2280 SSD, a 2 Tb WD Black 2230 SSD and 2 x 64 Gb Crucial SODIMMs for (in comparison) a whopping 1850 USD... Yes, that's pretty much a complete PC. Or at least it used to be. Hopefully prices for Radeons remain a bit stable for the coming weeks, I'm still figuring out which one to buy to replace my aging Geforce 1080 and drive my 3840x2160 widescreen...
Neutral
Not so sure that's true. This is single-threaded direct I/O doing a fio randwrite workload on a WD 850X Gen4 SSD: write: IOPS=18.8k, BW=73.5MiB/s (77.1MB/s)(4412MiB/60001msec); 0 zone resets slat (usec): min=2, max=335, avg= 3.42, stdev= 1.65 clat (nsec): min=932, max=24868k, avg=49188.32, stdev=65291.21 lat (usec): min=29, max=24880, avg=52.67, stdev=65.73 clat percentiles (usec): | 1.00th=[ 33], 5.00th=[ 34], 10.00th=[ 34], 20.00th=[ 35], | 30.00th=[ 37], 40.00th=[ 38], 50.00th=[ 40], 60.00th=[ 43], | 70.00th=[ 53], 80.00th=[ 60], 90.00th=[ 70], 95.00th=[ 84], | 99.00th=[ 137], 99.50th=[ 174], 99.90th=[ 404], 99.95th=[ 652], | 99.99th=[ 2311]
Likes it
And for those who are also on Emacs but on the Swiper/avy/ivy/counsel side of the fence, there's counsel-rg . I use it since before burntsushi (who's here on HN btw)'s ripgrep was shipped with Debian stable! > search your whole project with ripgrep and get a live preview of every matching candidate all inside of Emacs I'm sometimes searching not just my project but my entire user dir or my entire shared drive, from Emacs. A NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD (I'm using a WD SN850X which someone here recommended to me when I assembled my PC) is that fast and ripgrep too.
Likes it
FWIW, the T7 is not an NVME enclosure per se, but rather a "portable hard drive." Its issues are well documented in forums.[0][1][2] I've known a couple friends in real life who've owned it as well, and they ran into the same issues I did. I'm now using an OWC Envoy Express Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with a 4 TB WD Black SN850X and have no issues whatsoever. Very happy with this solution! [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/q8zvyt/samsung... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/kky9g5/my_sam... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/qp4m1h/white_d...
Likes it
> Especially for people who buy cheap 1TB or 2TB+ SSDs, they may be unpleasantly surprised when they copy some media files or start downloading a game from steam. Especially seen that the one who has the means to pay for fiber to the home able to sustain 500 Mbit/s+ download (at less than that even cheap SSDs shall sustain the write speed anyway right?) and has the means to buy games from Steam probably can afford to spend 50 EUR on a fast SSD? TFA mentions 137 EUR Samsung SSD from 2019 but prices have dropped since then. And nowadays all mobos ship with NVMe M.2 PCIe slots and you find stuff like that for 44 EUR: Sabrent M.2 NVMe SSD 256GB Interne Solid State 3400 MB/s read, PCIe 3.0 X4 2280 or for 80 EUR: Samsung 970 EVO Plus MZ-V7S1T0BW (that was a 200 EUR+ drive two years ago I think). Would have been interesting to compare vs those beasts, which are also cheap. My point is: if you've got a setup allowing you to max the write speed of a cheap SSD, you've got the 30 or 40 additional EUR to buy an ultra fast beast. P.S: I don't mind paying a bit more so as adviced here, for my new build I bought a Western Digital SN850X Black.
Likes it
I’m one of the chorus. I actually preordered a TOTL Asus Zephyrus Duo about a month ago, and it came in last week. It’s been a dream so far — 16 real cores of AMD 7945HX, laptop 4090, hybrid graphics, two real screens! Main display is a quite color-accurate 16:10 miniled with 240hz freesync, lower display is a high-PPI IPS touch panel, dual raid-able M2 slots (I put in dual WD SN850Xs in raid0 and that’s showing ~14.5GB/s reads and ~13Gb/s writes in CrystalDiskMark), decent sound and webcam, keyboard is at the bottom edge…the only downsides are the touchpad size is a bit strange (portrait orientation) and the click on it doesn’t feel quite Macbook nice, no USB4, and the power brick is very brick-like, with a thick cable that doesn’t flex very well. Cooling is excellent due to the intake fans under the second screen combined with the lower heat output of the AMD chip, allowing it to run maxed out without throttling…they did this right. I can’t get Pop_OS to install yet, guessing it might need the AMD raid driver like Windows did, requires further investigation. Anyway, excited for a Framework version too! While I prefer AMD integrated graphics to Intel, NVidia dGPU would be even better, and even better still if it was upgradable. Are laptop GPUs still available on MXM cards?
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
Thanks! I see that the people reporting problems with the (DRAMless) SN770 there also report no problems with the SN850X, but that might not be indicative either way—AFAIU the 8TB SN850X has somewhat different internals compared to its lower-capacity brethren. (It does put Framework’s decision to ship SN770—now SN7100—SSDs in their laptops as standard in an unfavourable light.)
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
Going to be a hard pass from me. Western Digital has had several high profile data loss issues across multiple product lines: Western Digital SN850 [1], SanDisk Extreme [2]. Western Digital's response has been very PR and not at all helpful toward the people who have lost data due to the faults in their products. Storage products have one job: reliably store your data. WD has shown lately that you roll the dice if your choose their products. [1] https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-wd-black-sn850-sudde... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/sandisk-extreme-ssds...
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
They have been bsod & crashing in win11. Hopefully like Samsung gets fixed fast, but it's been an issue for 6 mo now. Really quite impressed by the sn850x but also iirc it also bogs down under prolonged writes[1]. But great general speed, good price. Hoping WD can keep iterating well. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-black-sn850x-ssd-rev...