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- Just under two weeks ago, we brought you news of a new SanDisk client SSD that promised great Gen4 speeds, while at the same time providing very low active power usage in the area of 4 watts. A high performance low power SSD is a very promising proposition as it provides us with laptops that now reach full Gen 4 performance up to 7GB/s and more than a million IOPS. The SanDisk WD Blue SN5100 Gen4 SSD that we are reporting on today accomplishes just this, and it is also one of our few QLC NAND flash memory SSDs tested; all of which are DRAMless. Can this SSD make it to mainstream?
The SanDisk WD Blue SN5100 is a PCIe 4.0 (Gen4) four lane (x4) M.2 form factor 2280 SSD that is compliant with the NVMe 2.0 SSD protocol standard. It will be available in 500GB, 1,2 and 4TB capacities and its performance specifications list 7100MB/s read and 6700MB/s write along with 1000K IOPS read and 1300K IOPS write for the 2TB capacity we have in hand. performance is variable depending on capacity and full performance iis shown here:
The WD Blue SN5100 is a DRAMless SSD that uses the PC DRAM Host Memory Buffer (HMB) to accomplish what might normally be done with an onboard DRAM buffer chip and this SSD also utilizes SanDisk nCache 4.0, a hybrid SLC cache that improves performance of large file copying as well as and app responsiveness.
The SN5100 is comprised of a single sided black form factor 2280 PCB (printed circuit board) that contains a SanDisk branded Gen5 DRAMless four-channel NVMe SSD controller along with a single 2TB SanDisk eighth-generation BiCS8 QLC 3D NAND flash memory with CMOS bonded array (CBA) technology. There are only two chips on this SSD which provides for a much cooler total package.
Add to this that the WD Blue SN8100 has only a 4.1 watt active read and write power rating and this could be a very promising SSD for a laptop. The SN5100 also comes with free downloads of SanDisk SSD Dashboard as well as Acronis True Image Disk Migration software which can be downloaded here.
Manufacturers suggested retail pricing for the SanDisk WD Blue SN5100 Gen4 SSD is set at $54.99 (500GB), $79.99 (1TB), $149.99 (2TB) and $299.99 for the 4TB capacity. Check Amazon for availability and updated pricing.
Let’s get to some performance…