Western Digital’s leaked PCIe 5 SSD could be an utter speed demon

I imagine that it’s got to be super frustrating to work on a product launch for months or years…only for a retailer to spoil the big reveal by putting up a listing ahead of the official announcement. That seems to be the case for a new Western Digital Gen 5 SSD, which claims to have read speeds of 14.9 gigabytes per second. That would make it the fastest consumer drive in the world if it holds.

Twitter/X leaker @momomo_US spotted the Amazon Germany page for the unannounced WD Black SN8100, which appears to be a follow-up to the popular SN7100 series (PCWorld’s favorite Gen 4 drives). This new 1TB PCIe 5.0 drive claims to have sequential read speeds of up to 14,900MB/s, which would let it beat the Crucial T705 by a hair, at least on paper. As Tom’s Hardware notes, it would also be reaching closer to the theoretical maximum speed of PCIe 5.0, 16 gigabytes a second on the standard x4 SSD lane setup.

The listing says that the drive can write at 14,000MB/s and that the usual 2TB and 4TB models will also be available, presumably both in the standard 2280 (80mm) size and with the pictured slim heatsink. The Amazon listing says it’ll cost €199.99 for the 1TB version and arrive on May 30th, at least in Europe. With the current economic chaos from import taxes, I wouldn’t venture a guess as to what it’ll cost in the US.