Following up on their Blue and Green SSDs launched back in October, Western Digital has now launched a Black series SSD:

Unlike the Green and Blue which are SATA products available in 2.5" and M.2 (SATA) form factors, the Black is a pure M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 product. These were rumored to have a Marvell controller, but the samples I saw floating around CES appeared to have SanDisk branding. Flash will very likely be SanDisk 15nm TLC (with SLC cache). Specs are as follows:

256GB / 512GB

$109 / $199 ($0.42 / $0.39 / GB)

Random read: 170k

Random write: 130k/134k

Sequential read: 2.05 GB/s

Sequential write: 700 / 800 MB/s

Endurance 80 / 160 TBW

Warranty: 5 years

Power: 5.5 mW idle / 8.25 W peak

Pricing looks very competitive for an NVMe SSD, but we will have to see how the performance shakes out when compared against other budget SSDs. The WD Blue 1TB performed very well in our new test suite, so here's hoping the Black is equally surprising.

WD's press blast appears after the break.

PC Perspective's CES 2017 coverage is sponsored by NVIDIA.

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