WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSD Linux Benchmarks
First up with the write-heavy SQLite benchmarks, the WD_BLACK SN8100 was easily the front-runner out of all the drives tested under Ubuntu Linux. The WD_BLACK drives have long performed well in Linux database workloads while the likes of the Samsung consumer SSDs have performed abnormally poor. With the WD_BLACK SN8100 it proved to be a big upgrade over the Gen4 WD_BLACK SN850X drive.
The WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB was also performing much better than the other PCIe Gen5 SSDs tested for the write-heavy SQLite testing.
With the MariaDB database server and carrying out write heavy tests, the WD_BLACK SN8100 was performing fairly well and better than other PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs but strangely well behind the WD_BLACK SN850 series drives on their Gen5 connectivity. Even with using a PCIe Gen5 NVMe slot for all of these drives tested and re-testing to make sure the Thermalright heatsink was effectively keeping the drive cool, the older WD_BLACK drives did better for MariaDB.
For an alternate MariaDB benchmark configuration, the older WD_BLACK SN850 drives continued performing slightly better. At least the SN8100 was performing better than the other drives tested.