It’s one of the fastest SSDs in the market today

If you want to turbocharge your PC or notebook’s loading and access speeds, you’ll definitely need to buy an SSD. For people looking to inject serious speed into their build, that meant buying Samsung’s 970 EVO NVMe SSD and spending a fair amount of cash to get the best performing solid state drive available.

That’s no longer the case, as Western Digital’s new WD Black NVME SSD has access speeds that rival Samsung’s offering in a far cheaper package.

What is it?

The WD Black NVMe 500GB SSD is a small, high-performance storage drive for people who want the fastest possible loading/access times for their PCs and notebooks. Solid state drives like this one have faster boot times and program loads than a traditional hard disk drive, though that performance comes at a higher cost.

The WD Black NVMe is Western Digital’s fastest performing NVMe drive to date, and comes in a few thousand less compared to its closest competition, the Samsung 970 Evo. While both are seemingly expensive, power users and competitive gamers who want fast read/write speeds need only look at the Php 9,100 price tag of Western Digital’s offering versus the Php 12,488 sticker price of Samsung’s 970 EVO to see what drive really delivers the most bang for the buck.

NVMe SSD? Sounds expensive.

Not really. NVMe SSDs are no longer exotic hardware made for people with deep pockets, as the tech has been slowly entering the mainstream PC market for a few months now. The main advantage here is that they’re purpose-built storage mediums that use the PCIe bus instead of the old SATA connectors that previous generation SSDs utilized.

It’s one of the main reasons why mid-range to high-end notebooks feel incredibly fast these days, since they’re usually armed with NVMe SSDs.

If you’re upgrading your PC this season, jumping to an NVMe SSD from an HDD really is something else. Storage access speed is one of the last remaining bottlenecks for real and perceived performance, and even if you’re using a fairly new SATA SSD, performance from an NVMe drive is far superior to anything that still uses the SATA connector.

We’re not saying that traditional HDDs don’t have their place, as they’re still the most economical way of storing large amounts of data that aren’t frequently used. If you’re like us who uses our PC for gaming and video editing, you’ll have your OS and most played games on the NVMe SSD drive with video storage and other ancillary files on the hard disk drive.

So how fast is the Western Digital Black NVMe?

Pretty freaking’ fast. To test the speed of the drive we used CrystalDiskMark 6, to test the read and write speeds of the drive.

Western Digital advertises their new NVMe SSD drive as having a 3,400 MB/s sequential reads and 2,800 MB/s sequential writes, which is pretty similar to the published performance of Samsung’s 970 Evo at 3,500 MB/s sequential reads and 2,500 MB/s sequential writes. The main difference is the price: Western Digital’s drive is a few thousand pesos cheaper compared to Samsung’s offering.

Let’s take a look at actual benchmarks from CrystalDiskMark 6 compared to the published performance of their rival:

As you can see, the drive didn’t quite hit the advertised marks but was close enough to the advertised performance of its closest rival.

And if you’re still not convinced, here’s a quick look at the performance gap of a regular HDD and a SATA SSD compared to the NVMe drive we’re testing:

Should you buy it?

If you’re looking to supercharge your next PC build, then yes, Western Digital’s new Black NVMe SSD storage is definitely an upgrade item you need. It is pretty close to the performance of its closest rival at a few thousand pesos cheaper – the 500GB variant that we used is priced at Php 9,800, quite a bit less than the Php 12,488 sticker price of the 512GB 970 EVO that it is going up against.

Prices for the 250GB variant is also quite reasonable, at just Php 4,900 VS the Php 6,988 price tag of the 250GB Samsung 970 EVO.