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The WD Black SN850x is our top SSD pick for PC gaming, offering some of the fastest load times we’ve ever recorded – so I thought I’d let you know that the 1TB size of the drive has dropped to £47.99 on Ebay when you use code APPLY20 at the checkout. That’s a tiny fraction of the drive’s original RRP and the lowest price we’ve ever recorded for this size. All told, it’s a hugely impressive deal.
The WD SN850x is a top-tier PCIe 4.0 SSD, so you’ll need a laptop or motherboard that supports this version of the PCIe spec (or the later PCIe 5.0 spec) to use it at full speed. That includes most motherboards made in the last three or four years, including AMD’s B550, B650, X570 and X670 series and Intel’s Z490, Z590, Z690 and Z790 series motherboards (and most corresponding B and H-series boards too – consult Google with the model name of your motherboard and the search term “PCIe” to be sure; manufacturer websites and product listings are the best places to confirm this).
The SN850x is also a great fit for PS5, easily surpassing Sony’s speed requirements, but the company does recommend an NVMe heatsink for use in the small PS5 expansion enclosure.
With a suitable motherboard or laptop in place, you’ll enjoy speeds up to 7300MB/s reads and 6600MB/s writes, plus around 800K IOPS in random reads – all of which puts the SN850x amongst the Samsung 990 Pro and a very small cadre of competing SSDs in offering these sorts of speeds.
Here’s what we said about the SN850x in our write-up:
Most importantly, the SN850X is much faster in games, and faster than every other SSD we’ve tried outside of the Samsung 990 Pro below. Taking only 6.7 seconds to load a Shadow of the Tomb Raider save, it shaves nearly three seconds off the Black SN850’s time, and clearly beats other premium PCIe 4.0 SSDs like the Kingston Fury Renegade (9.6 seconds) and PNY XLR8 CS3140 (7.3 seconds). In the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, its 3187MB/s random read speed and 4261MB/s random write speed results show an outstanding suitability for games and general PC usage alike.
So – it’s a great drive at a great price, do pick one up!