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 - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here.
The WD Blue's average data rate on the Light test is surprisingly slow and barely faster than the Crucial BX200. It appears that the WD Blue cannot deliver very fast burst performance even though it performs reasonably well under a sustained load.
While the WD Blue only barely beat the Crucial BX200 on average data rate, it clearly wins on average service time. The WD Blue's empty drive average latency is substantially higher than most of the competition, but its full drive performance stands out less.
The number of high-latency outliers experienced by the WD Blue on the Light test is much higher than most of the competition, but also less than half what the Crucial BX200 suffered.
Power consumption is once again a highlight of the WD Blue, with above average performance that is slightly better than the SanDisk X400.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
75 Comments
View All Comments
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 :(