New SSDs from Western Digital, with the SN5000S. These are aimed at the OEM sector… On the one hand, that’s a good thing, considering their endurance. On the other hand, they’re also available at all price levels.
SN5000S: 600TB of writing capacity in 2TB!
The program features SSDs interfaced with PCIe 4.0 x4, all in M.2 2280 or 2230 format. Internally, it benefits from memory chips from Toshiba in the form of BICS6 memory. The latter is of the QLC type, with 162 layers. As for capacities, this series is available in 512 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB models.
In terms of performance, the entire range boasts a sequential read speed of 6 Gb/s. However, write speeds will vary according to capacity. The 512 GB model is the slowest, with a write speed of just 4.2 GB/s, compared with 5.4 GB/s for the 1 and 2 TB versions. As for random performance, we record at best 900k IOPS for reading and 900k IOPS for writing.
Now, what’s really scary is the endurance, since the small 512GB model boasts just 150TB of write capacity, compared with 300TB for 1TB and 600TB for 2TB. This is a far cry from the 1200TB of a 2TB SN770. But there are worse cases, such as the P3 Plus 2TB at just 440TB.
Fortunately, this model seems to be aimed at OEMs only. Well, let’s hope we don’t buy a machine pre-assembled with this type of SSD… Unless you want to use it as a secondary storage SSD .
