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• jimjamjamie - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

  > WD Black
  
  > Blue PCB
  
  Great job, guys.

• beginner99 - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link

  Not to mention black branded HDDs used to be the best tier / fastest tier and here they offer a crappy TLC drive under that brand.

• capedave - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link

  Ah, No mention anywhere what type of nand. TLC, crap! Figures. Too little too late. And now Black is entry level? Ouch, I'll stick with Samsung for sure.

• edward1987 - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link

  Yes Samsung has much better performance: 3200 to 3500MB/s read speed. IOPS 300-330K 360-440K
  
  https://www.span.com/compare/MZ-V6E250BW-vs-MZ-V6P...

• xcopy - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link

  Actually, for a "Black" drive the warranty stats are not that impressive when you look at Sandisk offerings and the competition. The 512gb, which is very small IMO, has a 160 TBW rating, making the 5 year warranty less useful. IOW, you're not getting much....
  
  Heck, even the bastardized WD Blue SSD - a Sandisk X400 clone with tweaks - has a much more robust expected longevity. Oh well, that's WD for you; stripping away as much as they can to improve their bottom line, always at the customers expense.....

• vladx - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link

  Why does PCB color matter?

• Batmeat - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

  LOL ....agreed though. Not the best when it came to their marketing decision on that one.

• Tchamber - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

  Haha, right?
  But the prices are nice. Better than SATA performance, not as good as Samsung Pro, but the price...is right! I'm building a system this year, probably AMD, and narrowing it down to m.2. I hope these prices are accurate when they hit the streets.

• WinterCharm - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

  Yeah, the prices are excellent!

• Magichands8 - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link

  $0.40 per GB.
  
  "Yeah, the prices are excellent!"
  
  Uh, wut?

• Tchamber - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link

  The Samsung 960 EVO is $.50/GB, and the 950 Pro is $.686/GB, so yeah, $.40 is great.

• jjj - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link

  Faster than Intel's 600p but maybe still a bit slow to be a great buy.
  If they had seq write at 1200MB/s and both randoms at over 200k, it would be nice.

• Space Jam - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link

  8.25w peaks and no heat spreader, can you say thermal throttling?

• SodaAnt - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link

  Why is Samsung the only ones who can seeminly make a m.2 ssd with 1TB of NAND?

• Salvor - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link

  Their 3D stuff is still denser than everyone else, isn't it? I think there's a 2tb 960 pro coming out in a few days.

• Dark_Complex - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link

  The 2TB 960 Pro is already out, a number of places have them in stock.

• AnotherGuy - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link

  They probably dont read Anandtech or other tech sites to know that 512gb has long been surpassed in SSDs

• nwarawa - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link

  All this does it make me want Crucial's inevitable NVMe mainstream drive (MX350?) even more. Pricing wlll be better, performance will be better, and will still be the only mainstream drive that gives at least partial power-loss protection (Intel 320, I miss you...)

• Brado78 - Monday, March 6, 2017 - link

  Guess what QLC NAND is right around the corner :O, TLC has come a long way since it's first introduction.