The Western Digital Blue (1TB) SSD Review: WD Returns to SSDs
by Billy Tallis on October 11, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- SSDs
- Storage
- Western Digital
- SanDisk
AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here.
The WD Blue is tied with the OCZ Trion 150 for average data rate on the Heavy test, where the SanDisk X400 had a substantial advantage that put it close to MLC drives.
As with The Destroyer, the WD Blue only has slightly higher average latency than the X400 and is not as slow as the Trion 150. Additionally, the average latency on a full drive beats competitors like the OCZ VX500 and Crucial MX300 that suffer disproportionately when their SLC caches are exhausted.
The number of high-latency outliers makes it obvious that the WD Blue is a TLC drive, but also makes it clear that the drive degrades gracefully under a heavier load rather than falling apart.
The WD Blue is slightly more power efficient on the Heavy test than the X400, and both drives have better than average power consumption.
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HollyDOL - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link
Indeed, all those companies had hiccups, but out of those two long term RMAing rate at friend's computer shop for Seagate is almost double of WD's (like... it was 9% of sold WD and 18% of sold Seagates, numbers being example, not actual ones).Then againt, it's 7 weeks since I had WD Red failure & RMAing.
so... backup, backup, backup and then again backup...
mapesdhs - Friday, October 14, 2016 - link
Never ceases to amaze me the number of business users I come across that have no backup of any of their systems or data at all.jamyryals - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
Wow, I didn't realize the 1TB prices had come down so much. Pretty awesomeImpulses - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link
Prices haven't budged much in over a year, I paid $300-ish (ea.) for 2x 1TB EVOs back around the Skylake launch, well over a year ago... The X400 was already cheaper at the time, but I was fine with the slight premium for the faster EVO. WD is basically launching an average to sub average drive at nearly the price point that an EVO has held for 12+ months...mapesdhs - Friday, October 14, 2016 - link
In some cases they've gone way up. The 850 EVO was pretty cheap in Jan/16, since when it's skyrocketed.Jad77 - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
Lets hope the Black drives, when they make an appearance, are NVMe - in U.2 and M.2 form factors.plopke - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
I would say my experience with WD is about 3/5 and sandisk 4/5 and I mean the complete picture product quality,product description,price,support,drivers,firmware,....Curious how this take over will go , how they will use sandisk brand name and knowledge. I fear it will become a typical , safe cost because of the purchase , dropped support for products , confused technical support people ,.... but I can always hope.
cknobman - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
I think you have a typo in your charts, the 1TB drive is showing $299.Other outlets are listing it as $199.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
I just double-checked with WD and it's definitely $299. If anyone has it listed at $199, then that would seem to be in error.cknobman - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
Yep you are correct. Thanks!Now I'm sad, deep down I knew $199 was too good to be true :(