WD unwraps the holidays with new high-performance PCIe Gen 4x4 SSDs starting under $60

In a nutshell: Western Digital has introduced a sleigh full of new storage devices just in times for the holidays, including a new high-performance NVMe solid-state drive starting under $60. The WD Black SN7100 is a PCIe Gen 4x4 DRAMless SSD targeting mainstream gamers. It features Western Digital's latest TLC 3D NAND and is offered in 500 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB capacities.

The top tier drive boasts sequential read speeds of up to 7,250 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s sequential writes, with random read and write IOPS of 1000K and 1400K, respectively. According to WD, this model is 35 percent faster than the previous generation.

Performance typically scales with capacity, and that is the case here as well. The 500 GB drive, for example, is a bit slower at 6,800 MB/s sequential reads and 5,800 MB/s sequential writes, and 760K ...