Toshiba"s X300 PRO and N300 PRO CMR-based HDDs for NAS and Plex/media servers are great deals. If you are looking for high-capacity drives for such purposes or even backups, check them out in this dedicated article before the discount runs dry.
If you are looking instead for something faster, much faster, that still offers plenty of capacity, then WD"s SN850X 8TB has fallen to its lowest ever price (purchase link under the specs table down below).
The 850X is a PCIe Gen4-based SSD and comes with DRAM cache such that metadata caching is a breeze on it (this helps in faster random access times), and the drive does not need to rely on system memory.
The 850X is built on TLC NAND and has heaps of endurance especially since this is an 8TB drive. Another major win for an 8TB drive like this is its SLC cache which should be much higher than the amount you would get on a 2TB model, say. If you are following Neowin, you may be familiar with how maxing out SLC cache can lead to big issues especially when the firmware is not up to the task.
The technical specifications of the WD_BLACK SN850X 8TB are given in the table below:
| Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Form factor | M.2 2280 (double‑sided) |
| Interface/protocol | PCIe 4.0 x4 / NVMe 1.4 |
| Controller | WD Triton MP16+ (20-82-000292-B2) |
| NAND | Kioxia BiCS6 162‑layer 3D TLC |
| DRAM | 2 GB (DDR4-3200 Micron) |
| SLC cache | Hybrid pSLC cache; approx. 2350 GB dynamic cache on bare drive |
| Seq. read | Up to 7,200 MB/s |
| Seq. write | Up to 6,600 MB/s |
| Random read | Up to 1,200,000 IOPS (4K) |
| Random write | Up to 1,200,000 IOPS (4K) |
| Write endurance | 4,800 TBW |
| MTBF | 1.8 million hours |
Get the drive at the link below:
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WD_BLACK 8TB SN850X (non-heatsink) - WDS800T2X0E: $539.99 (Sold and Shipped by Amazon US)
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