Last month, WD introduced the second generation of its Black series SSDs. This top model of the storage manufacturer should be considerably faster than its predecessor and thus be able to compete with the popular NVMe SSDs from Samsung, such as the recently released 970 Evo. Today we are testing the WD Black NVMe 2018 1TB to find out if WD is really participating in the high-end SSD market.

Of course, we have always known WD as a manufacturer of mechanical hard disk drives, but with the acquisition of Sandisk, the company also gained a position in the SSD market. However, the first generation Black SSDs were not very successful - their performance did not match the competition. In this second generation, not only is the board neatly black instead of blue, but the performance really needs to be brought to 'Black level'. For example, WD promises reading speeds of up to 3400 MB/s, compared to only 2050 MB/s in the previous generation. Writing speed should even have increased from 800 to 2800 MB/s.