The Western Digital Black PCIe SSD (512GB) Review
by Billy Tallis on March 8, 2017 8:30 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage and unlike our Iometer tests, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The WD Black's average data rate on The Destroyer is a little bit slower than the fastest SATA SSD of comparable capacity, and much faster than the Intel 600p. The Samsung 960 EVO is the only TLC-based SSD we've tested that outperforms the WD Black.
While the WD Black's average data rate didn't quite beat the best SATA SSDs, its average service time is substantially better than the Samsung 850 PRO, though nowhere close to most MLC PCIe SSDs.
The WD Black is no better than the Samsung 850 PRO at avoiding high-latency outliers above 100ms, but the WD Black has a significant advantage over all SATA SSDs at the 10ms threshold.
The WD Black's power efficiency during The Destroyer is poor, with total energy usage that is higher than almost all of its competitors.
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Gothmoth - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
why would anyone buy this?if you want M.2 you want performance.. this is just crap.
GoMoeJoe - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
Price according to mediocre performance.Glad to see WD entering the space though.
WinterCharm - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
Horrible price to performance ratio... if you're going to gimp reads this much on an M.2 SSD, then at least give us 1TB for $200.herbc - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
Noticed top end SATA 2.5 inch SSD's jumped in price considerably lately. Samsung 850 Pro 256 GB went from $129.00 to around $150.00 in a week.Magichands8 - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
Pretty much none of these SSDs are worth buying until the prices get down to around $0.12/GB and even then with a proper form factor. I suppose if you're particularly desperate or require them for some special niche use-case they will serve a purpose, ignorance not withstanding, but otherwise I just don't see the point.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
At 39c/GB, most people are already seeing that SSDs are far superior to HDDs for a majority of use cases.Jad77 - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
It's Blue, not Black.Makaveli - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
I don't get WD they may performance competitive drives in the spinning HD space. Yet when is comes to SSD's and M.2, NVMe drives they are happy with being bottom feeders!I guess its probably "a day late a dollor short" meaning it took them so long to enter the market everyone else was already so far ahead.
creed3020 - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
That has been WD's slogan and approach to SSD based storage for years. We've been saying for years that HDD's relevancy will continue to shrink and if these giants want to survive into tomorrow then they need to innovate, which this product is clearly not an example of. Its barely an also ran.CoreLogicCom - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
They just don't want to cannibalize the last remnants of their consumer hard drive business by producing SSDs that are faster than their hard drives...?