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The WD Black NVMe comes in a small, white and black box. Along with a picture of the drive, the front advertises many of its key features including its maximum read speed, 1TB capacity, 3D NAND flash and 5 year warranty. The back of the box doesn't have a lot of information on it. However, there is a small window that lets you see the drive and view the model name and serial number. Inside, you'll find the SSD as well as a small guide containing technical support and warranty information.
Physical Features:
The WD Black NVMe uses the 2280 form factor for M.2 (NGFF) SSDs. It measures 22 x 80 x 2.38 mm and tips the scales at a mere 7.5g. The drive also has an "M key" edge connector which provides PCIe SSDs with up to 4x lanes of bandwidth.
The WD Black NVMe is one of the first drives to use Western Digital's new Spectrum controller. According to the company, the controller is built on the 28nm process and features a tri-core design. The Spectrum is also equipped with a number of hardware accelerators, or sequencers, that handle things like NVMe command processing, data transfers and both power and thermal management. By offloading these tasks, the controller is able to deliver greater performance, while reducing power usage and latency. To top it all off, the Spectrum supports the latest version of SanDisk's nCache technology which improves sustained write performance by allowing data to be written directly to TLC NAND if the SLC cache is full.
For the 1TB version of the WD Black NVMe, Western Digital has opted to use its own SanDisk manufactured 64-layer BiCS 3D TLC NAND flash. Looking at the picture above, you can see that there are two 512GB NAND flash packages on the top of the PCB. The drive also has a single 1GB SK Hynix DDR4 SDRAM memory chip that is used for caching.
