The SN850x isn't a "gaming part", it's a top-of-the-line consumer SSD that uses the exact same type of NAND chips (3D TLC) that Apple uses in its products.
But anyway, in what world isn’t this a gaming product: https://shop.sandisk.com/products/ssd/internal-ssd/wd-black-...
“Built for elite gaming.
Crush load times and slash throttling, lagging, and texture pop-ins with the WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe™ SSD. …
Do more with WD_BLACK Dashboard The downloadable WD_BLACK Dashboard (Windows® only) monitors your drive’s health, lets you customize your RGB lighting, and, exclusively on the SN850X SSD, enables Game Mode 2.0 to transform your gaming experience.”
There really isn't. Apple is reported to use SanDisk 3D TLC NAND chips. SanDisk is owned by Western Digital, and the WD SSDs use SanDisk chips. They're literally the same chips.
Hell WD chips could be of higher quality as I am not suggesting I know their internal processes. I am saying things are optimized differently.
It could just come down to different binning of the same part, and it would still make a difference.
The why I’m still talking is because people seem to think buying a gaming SSD is a good idea when they also want longevity / low risk of future. The parts can last 10+ years but they’re designed with something else in mind.
One hardware guy mentioned internal defects can cause differences is the amount of reserve sectors that a final product ends up with. That’s exactly the kind of arbitrary cutoff that lets companies charge different prices for the same part.
Lower-grade flash with higher initial defect rates is what gets used in USB flash drives and SD cards, and some bargain-bin SSDs with lower usable capacities (ie. 960GB rather than 1TB).
The stuff used in a WD Black or WD Blue branded consumer SSD is not a different quality grade from the stuff used in any other mainstream consumer SSD, Apple's included.
At what grade? Plus, how much extra endurance is baked in to Apple's drives, i.e. how over-provisioned are they?
My MacBook Air M1 reports 99% health after being daily driven (and some 26TB written to it) at work since 2020 (we got these as soon as they introduced), and I don't baby its drive in any way.
Any flash storage has two main components: A controller and a set of flash chips, and a third component enters to the picture when connecting these two: number & nature of channels.
Starting from the controller (and channels), beside the obvious PCIe generation, there are some other factors. DRAM support, NAND support (not all NAND is the same!), number of channels, and the speed of these channels. A DRAMless SSD will suffer after its "pseudo-SLC" cache runs out, and the performance of the drive will generally suffer if the number of channels can't absorb the traffic coming from the PCIe side. Here, to have a top notch SSD, you need to have a good/fast controller with DRAM support, and enough channels with enough speed to absorb all traffic requests, so you can get use of the premium NAND chips you bought.
Next, we have the flash layout. Flash chips vary in speed, density and drive. A high density flash chip might be slower, or a flash chip might require higher drive, resulting in higher temperatures in general. In some cases, instead of populating all channels, a manufacturer might decide to populate a few channels and leave the rest unpopulated, creating a big but slower SSD.
Beyond that, there are other considerations like over-provisioning at flash level, "soft SLC cache" size, wear leveling capabilities under sustained load, etc. etc.
For example, an enterprise SSD comes with the "same" TLC chips, but over-provisioned 5:1 or 10:1 (10TB flash for 1TB capacity)
Now, let's see some real-world examples:
- Kingston NV2, NV3: A budget SSD with great capacity and price. DRAMless, no channel number guarantee, and might come in with TLC or QLC chips. Burst speeds are OK, will make 90% of the people happy, but slows down in long transfers and under heavy load. Runs cooking hot in both controller and flash side.
- Kingston KC3000: A higher end drive with part/channel guarantees, handles sustained load better, runs way cooler, ironically.
- Samsung 980/990 Pro: Samsung's higher end drive. Runs cool, sustains speed all over due to DRAM and tons of channels and vertical integration of controller + NAND.
- Samsung T7 Shield: Looks like an bulky 1.8" drive, but it's selling point is it can sustain 1050MB/s writes wihtout even slowing down until it's full. Never gets warm.
So, flash drives comes in all shapes and sizes and with specifications and capabilities all over the place. A WD Blue and WD Black won't perform the same. Same for Sandisk's Plus, Extreme, Extreme Pro series.
This is why OWC was/is the go-to 3rd party SSD provier for Macs for quite some time. They tune their drives similar to Apple's and very similar to what OS expects as behavior. It's not slap some controllers and flash chips on a PCB, change three fields in a firmware and sell.
Flash storage is black magic at this point, and thinking every box is the same is a big mistake.
This comment can be easily 3x longer, but I want to keep it readable.
That's just marketing language for "this is expensive af but you'll buy it because otherwise you're not an elite gamer!".
Maybe that doesn't make it a bad comparison, but the SN850X is def intended to be a gaming part.
[1]: https://www.westerndigital.com/brand/wd-black
[2]: https://www.westerndigital.com/en-in/products/internal-drive...
Gamers are the ones buying expensive parts so it makes sense to market to that. The next tier after this is basically server-class 10-20k machines which Apple is definitely not competing with (and SSDs are not really that much better in that class anyway). Dismissing SSDs as “gaming” parts as if it’s diminishing the quality misunderstands what’s happening here. It would be one thing if WD was ignoring fsyncs to achieve this performance but gamers don’t care about writes so much anyway and there’s no indication WD did that.
Source: I have the WD and Samsung parts as well as cheapo random SSDs.
The point I was trying to make by pointing out that the SN850x isn't a "gaming part" is that the SN850x is literally the top-of-the-line, most expensive consumer SSD sold by WD, and has practically the same specs as other top-of-the-line, most expensive competing parts like the Samsung 990 Pro. Being one of the most expensive SSDs on the market means that saying that the SN850x is a bad comparison because it's supposedly "lower price" is just false on its face.
To be more clear, getting equal performance without sacrificing anything would raise costs even further.
It’s easy to say moderate premium over normal business grade SSD’s but that doesn’t mean any specific number is correct. I’d say the equivalent to a 130$ to 220$ SSD assuming a stand alone equivalent exited, but the actual number depending on info Apple isn’t sharing. And yes the range is both above and below the specific part suggested.