The WD Black SN7100 is a new series of SSDs from Western Digital and they stand out both in performance connected to the PCIe 4.0 interface and in price, quite economical for a model we can consider medium.

The SSD offer is rich and we can find very good deals this Black Friday week. Some come from Western Digital itself, the world’s leading manufacturer of hard drives, but it knows how to focus its solutions where the market has reached, flash storage.

WD Black SN7100, cheap and fast, even without DRAM

They are units M.2 2280 with interface interface support PCIe Gen 4×4. Although they can be used on any computer, including desktops, the manufacturer says they were designed with laptops and handheld gaming machines in mind. They don’t have a cooling system, but they won’t be necessary. They do not reach the temperatures of Gen5 solutions and are up to 100 percent more energy efficient than the previous generation units.

The performance is very good, almost at the maximum of the Gen4 interface and more than sufficient for any type of consumer PC. The data transfer performance of the highest disk (2TB) is up to 7250 MB/s sequential read and 6900 MB/s sequential writewith random read and write IOPS of 1,000,000 and 1,400,000, respectively. According to WD, this model is 35% faster than the previous generation.

These units use proprietary TLC 3D NAND flash memory and the company’s internal controller. It must be said that they do not have additional DRAM memory, which is usually used as a cache to speed up access to the most used data. We don’t know what will affect the specific performance of these units, although this is usually a strategy that mid-range and entry-level vendors tend to pursue as it lowers costs, consumption and prices.

The WD Black SN7100 will be available in the following weeks in the retail channel and on the manufacturer’s web portal in three versions, depending on the storage capacity, and at the following prices:

• 512GB: $59.99.
• 1TB: $89.99.
• 2TB: $149.99.

They will be delivered with five-year warranty and with a nominal resistance (version 2 Tbyte) in Tbytes written 1,200 TBW. A fourth variant with 4 TB will be launched in 2025.