WD Black SN7100 2TB NVMe SSD Review

Today, we are looking at the WD Black SN7100 2TB NVMe SSD. It’s been a little while since we have looked at a consumer SSD, and the SN7100 seemed like a good entry point to get back into the swing of things. The SN7100 is WD’s DRAM-less entry into the high-performance Gen4 SSD market, an arena dominated almost entirely by drives equipped with a DRAM cache. I’ll be interested to see how it stacks up compared to older drives with their hardware cache.

WD Black SN7100 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD

The WD Black SN7100 2TB comes in a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.

Readers familiar with WD’s SSD offerings will likely recognize this drive’s layout; it is almost identical looking to their WD Blue line of drives, with the single NAND package physically separated from the controller on the drive. Long ago, I somewhat accused WD of ‘repainting‘ one of their consumer class drives as a Red drive without making many other improvements, and given the physical appearance of this drive, I will be keeping a keen eye on this drive compared to the WD Blue line.

With that said, the SN7100 continues the tradition of being a highly vertically integrated drive from WD. They supply both the NAND flash in the form of the WD co-developed Kioxia BiCS6 162-layer TLC, as well as the in-house WD controller.

The backside of the WD SN7100 has nothing on it except screen-printed logos, which is to be expected.

WD Black SN7100 2TB SSD Specs

The WD Black SN7100 is available at 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacity points.

The 2TB model has specified 7250 MB/s read and 6900 MB/s sequential write speeds, which would position this drive very near the interface limits for a Gen 4 SSD. Most drives claiming this kind of performance have a DRAM cache, which the SN7100 lacks, so I will be interested to see what effect that has.

One slightly interesting note here is that there is a disagreement between the rated specs posted online, and the rated read performance quoted on the printed box. The box says 7000 MB/s, slightly less than the 7250 MB/s posted online. 7250 MB/s is the number on the Amazon listing as well, so that’s the one I’ll be keeping in mind when looking at the performance results.

Rated endurance on the SN7100 2TB is 1200 TBW, which is perfectly in line for a 2TB drive. Finally, rounding out the specs is the industry standard 5-year warranty.

CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD and confirms we are operating at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 2.0.

Test System Configuration

We are using the following configuration for this test:

• Motherboard: MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X (12C/24T)
• RAM: 2x 16GB DDR5-6000 UDIMMs

Our testing uses the WD SN7100 2TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. This slot supports up to PCIe Gen 5 x4. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data, and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.

Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.