The Western Digital SN850 (w/ Heatsink) is a solid-state drive in the M.2 2280 form factor, launched on October 8th, 2020. It is available in capacities ranging from 500 GB to 2 TB. This page reports specifications for the 1 TB variant. With the rest of the system, the Western Digital SN850 (w/ Heatsink) interfaces using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection. The SSD controller is the Black G2 (20-82-10034-A1) Triton MP16+ from WD, a DRAM cache chip is available. Western Digital has installed 96-layer TLC NAND flash on the SN850 (w/ Heatsink), the flash chips are made by Toshiba. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are soaked up more quickly. The cache is sized at 300 GB, once it is full, writes complete at 2200 MB/s. Copying data out of the SLC cache (folding) completes at 1340 MB/s. Thanks to support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface, performance is excellent. The SN850 (w/ Heatsink) is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s and 5,300 MB/s write; random IOPS reach up to 1000K for reads and 720K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 279 USD. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Western Digital guarantees an endurance rating of 600 TBW, a typical value for consumer SSDs.