If we look back just 10 years we would never have thought that the world of SSDs would be so competitive as to talk about performance, IOPS, TBW and other parameters. In addition, we surely would not have said that it would be within the gaming world, where now each manufacturer tries to scratch the maximum performance to boost the FPS. For this reason, today we are going to technically compare two giants in the sector: the WD Black SN850 and the Samsung 980 PRO , both in their 1 TB versions, since they are the best sellers. Which is better?
As with its predecessor, the Western Digital arrives in markets and stores around the world with a double flavor: the WDS100T1X0E-00AFY0 and the WDS100T1XHE-00AFY0 , but how are they different? Well, the first of them is the version without heatsink, while the second does include it. To match the comparison we have chosen the outdoor version, since the Samsung does not include a heatsink as such.
Western Digital Black SN850 vs Samsung 980 PRO 1 TB: weapons on top
The first thing that we are going to check and compare are their formats, since in both cases they carry M.2 in its 2280 version, something very typical that at the moment is necessary due to the technology of its NAND Flash and the chosen size of 1 TB.
In the case of the Samsung 980 PRO, we obtain memories designed and manufactured by the company itself, which it calls V-NAND 3-bit MLC , which is surprising for being the latest SSD of the brand. The Western Digital Black SN850 gets a 96-layer TLC BiCS4 memory, so technically this is more advanced than its rival, but as we will see later that will not be the case.
As for the interface, both SSDs are based on PCIe Gen 4 x4 , but the Samsung only works with the NVMe 1.3C protocol, while the Western Digital does it with version 1.4 , so at this point again WD is about to in front of Samsung. Moment to look at his drivers, where the Korean is gathering a Samsung Elpis , of which everything is unknown and is precisely the great secret of the company.
Western Digital on the other hand uses a custom driver too, but it doesn’t go for Elpis, instead it gets a WD Black G2 to bring its SSD to life.
Caches are widely criticized in NVMe, do they measure up?
As good high-end NVMe SSDs that they are, companies have decided to give their best in this section, aware that when the cache is full the performance will plummet on their SSD. For this reason, Samsung has included 1 GB DDR4 SDRAM in Low Power version , totally manufactured by them. Meanwhile, the WD Black SN850 has also managed to introduce 1 GB of DDR4 nCaché 4.0 , but they do not specify anything beyond this, so we could give a technical draw in this section because both are hybrid SLCs.
In consumption and durability, Samsung gives many more figures than Western Digital, but considering all the above, they should not be far behind: 8.9 watts maximum and 1.5 million hours in MTBF or 600 TBW . What about performance? Well, it is really the subject of debate, since the WD achieves a whopping 7000 MB / s of sequential reading and 5300 MB / s of sequential writing.
In contrast, the Samsung 980 PRO 1 TB achieves 7000 MB / s and 5000 MB / s respectively with 1,000,000 IOPS in both scenarios. The SN850 achieves 1,000,000 read and 720,000 random write IOPS here , so, although the Korean SSD is 300 MB / s behind in file transfer, it has a higher IOPS performance, which is much more important than transfers. .
Lastly, both manufacturers recommend an operating temperature between 0 and 70 degrees and offer a full 5-year limited warranty. So which one to buy? It is really difficult to choose one of them, but you have to get wet and in this case and for very little the Samsung 980 PRO is the recommended option for gamers, while the WD BLACK SN850 is perhaps a better option for developers or video editors, since that its 300 MB / s more can make a difference depending on which environments.
