The Western Digital Black PCIe SSD (512GB) Review
by Billy Tallis on March 8, 2017 8:30 AM ESTAnandTech 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 Black's average data rate on the Light test is higher than the Intel 600p or any SATA SSD, but the Samsung 850 Pro comes very close when the test is run on a full drive. When the test is run on a fresh drive the WD Black is substantially faster than the theoretical limits of SATA.
The WD Black's average service time is just slightly worse than its cheapest MLC-based PCIe competition, and its full-drive latency is better than the Intel 600p's empty-drive latency. Most SATA drives exhibit at least twice the latency in either test condition.
The rankings for latency outliers are similar to the average service time scores. The WD Black is close to but not quite as good as most of the PCIe competition, and the Intel 600p and all the SATA SSDs are trailing way behind.
The WD Black is in a four or five-way tie for last place in power efficiency (ignoring the Intel SSD 750). This is one of the few tests where the Intel 600p proves to be more efficient than most PCIe SSDs, but the SATA SSDs and Samsung's PCIe SSDs still rank higher.
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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...?