The Western Digital Blue (1TB) SSD Review: WD Returns to SSDs

ATTO

ATTO's Disk Benchmark is a quick and easy freeware tool to measure drive performance across various transfer sizes.

WD Blue 1TBCrucial BX100 1TBCrucial BX200 960GBCrucial MX200 1TBOCZ Trion 100 960GBOCZ Trion 150 960GBOCZ Vector 180 960GBOCZ VX500 1TBSamsung 850 EVO 1TBSamsung 850 Pro 1TBSanDisk Extreme Pro 960GBSanDisk X400 1TBOCZ RD400A 1TB

The WD Blue shows slightly better write speeds on the ATTO test than the SanDisk X400, but both fade a bit in read speed toward the end of the test.

AS-SSD

AS-SSD is another quick and free benchmark tool. It uses incompressible data for all of its tests, making it an easy way to keep an eye on which drives are relying on transparent data compression. The short duration of the test makes it a decent indicator of peak drive performance.

The AS-SSD test seldom shows large differences in performance, and the WD Blue performs almost identically to the X400. The write speed is still a bit on the low side.

Idle Power Consumption

Since the ATSB tests based on real-world usage cut idle times short to 25ms, their power consumption scores paint an inaccurate picture of the relative suitability of drives for mobile use. During real-world client use, a solid state drive will spend far more time idle than actively processing commands. Our testbed doesn't support the deepest DevSlp power saving mode that SATA drives can implement, but we can measure the power usage in the intermediate slumber state where both the host and device ends of the SATA link enter a low-power state and the drive is free to engage its internal power savings measures.

We also report the drive's idle power consumption while the SATA link is active and not in any power saving state. Drives are required to be able to wake from the slumber state in under 10 milliseconds, but that still leaves plenty of room for them to add latency to a burst of I/O. Because of this, many desktops default to either not using SATA Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM) at all or to only enable it partially without making use of the device-initiated power management (DIPM) capability. Additionally, SATA Hot-Swap is incompatible with the use of DIPM, so our SSD testbed usually has DIPM turned off during performance testing.

The WD Blue uses a few milliwatts more at idle than the X400. In the slumber state this is not a problem and the WD Blue's power draw is about average. The active idle power draw is a bit on the high side given that the MX300 draws about two thirds what the WD Blue draws when both drives use the same controller and DRAM.