We think the WD Black SN850 is the best PCIe 4.0 SSD, and it’s now on sale. £99 at CCL gets you the premium 1TB model with a heatsink, some £30 cheaper than Amazon.
This is the lowest price we’ve ever seen for this model, actually, even lower than it was during Prime Day, so it’s well worth picking this up if you’re after a high-speed drive for your PC or PS5.
The SN850 scored very highly when Katharine reviewed it last year, with the erstwhile hardware editor and current RPS hedgehog noting its faster game loading times and substantially better performance in synthetic tests – so you should see significantly better results once games start to better exploit high-speed SSDs as DirectStorage hopefully eventually finally becomes a thing.
In the here and now, I’d suggest that this is best suited for anyone that wants a relatively future-proof drive, or can make use of the higher sequential speeds in content creation tasks like rendering 4K video. However, random performance – such as game loading and operating system tasks – are still excellent too, but the difference between this an a cheaper PCIe 3.0 drive isn’t likely to be as obvious here.
Previously you had to spend upwards of £140 for this level of performance, especially if you wanted a fancy model with a built-in heatsink like this one, so seeing it drop to below the £100 mark is a big step forward indeed.
Thanks for joining us once again, and we’ll be back for just one more deal this week before the weekend. Cheerio!
