I recently picked up a 4TB WD BLACK SN850XE NVMe SSD for just $80 from Facebook Marketplace. It's been shucked from an original enclosure, and I did some testing with Crystal Disk, discovering the write speeds are only around 300 MB/s. It seems like this particular model is deliberately speed-limited to discourage shucking. I'm planning to use it primarily for gaming and media storage, so the current speed is fine for now, but I'm starting a new PC build soon. I'm curious if it's possible to flash the firmware to replace it with the standard SN850X version, potentially unlocking its full PCIe 4.0 speeds. I'm not worried about the risk of bricking; I just want to know if anyone's managed to do this before and what the process would entail.
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Wow, $80 for 4TB sounds too good to be true, and I wouldn't jump to conclusions about it being fake right away. It's more likely that the drive is intentionally capped to prevent over-performance since it was shucked. I've read mixed things about flashing firmware on these drives; WD typically makes it hard by implementing signature checks that only allow their officially sanctioned firmware to run on their drives.
Is there a way to bypass those checks? I wouldn't mind risking a brick if it could actually unlock the drive's performance.