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3D MARK STORAGE GAMING BENCHMARK
UL Solutions has created a new storage gaming benchmark that we will start to use as new SSDs come in. The 3DMark Storage Benchmark DLC extends 3DMark Advanced Edition with a dedicated component test for measuring the gaming performance of SSDs and other storage hardware. It supports all the latest storage technologies and tests practical, real-world gaming performance for activities such as loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.
The SN5100 placed 20th of all SSDs tested to date with a 3D Mark Storage score of 5089
3D MARK MS DIRECT STORAGE FEATURE TEST
As our SanDisk WD Blue SN5100 2TB QLC DRAMless SSD is MS DirectStorage compatible, we thought we might take advantage of the 3DMark DirectStorage Feature Test and see how this SSD fared. MS DirectStorage, in very basic terms, allows direct transfer of data from your SSD storage directly to your GPU, eliminating its historical necessary passage from the SSD through the CPU to RAM, back through the CPU and finally to the GPU VRAM. This is, for the most part at this time, intended on increasing game load times,reducing CPU overhead and providing more detailed graphics.
In our testing, data transfer achieved a 153.8% faster transfer of data than with MS DirectStorage disabled.
REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
The WD Blue line of SSDs have been around for some time and we reviewed the 4TB version of the SN5000 just over a year ago. That review can be found here. Thiis SSD had fallen under its Western Digital namesake until February of this year (2025) when WD completed its separation of its flash memory business, making SanDisk its own publicly traded company once again. The SN51000 demonstrates a 30% improvement over the SN5000… but that’s not all.
This SN5100 is vastly different than its predesessor in, not only its Gen 4 performance of 7.1GB/s read and 6.6GB/s write , but also this is a much cooler SSD totally suited for ultra and laptops. It speaks to a very low 4.1 watts during active read and write use and this is a dual chip single sided SSD. By dual chip, we mean there is SanDisks 4-channel DRAMless in-house Gen 4 SSD controller, and all memory is tackled by a single BiCS8 3D CBA NAND flash memory chip that is 2TB in size. Formatted, this single chip provides 1863GB available storage volume. Low power. Single-sided. Dual chip. Yet it reaches top level Gen 4 performance while maintaining a great price point with a 5-year limited warranty. Great job SanDisk!
CHECK SANDISK WD BLUE SN5100 PRICING AT AMAZON
