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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
36 Comments
View All Comments
BrokenCrayons - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
I hope they're not foolish enough to think that producing bottom feeder SSDs will slow the decline of their hard drive business. They're certainly aware of the fact that there are other companies that will land sales that shrink their hard drive business even if they never produce their own solid state storage solutions. It's genuinely perplexing why WD isn't pushing SanDisk to develop a more competitive product line. Maybe they are and this is just a stopgap measure, but I do wonder what's happening.timbotim - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
I simply don't get this SSD for desktops. If you're going to be in the slow SSD market don't you just need to be the cheapest? If you're not, what's the point? Do you hope there's sufficient clueless/confused users out there who will buy on availability?I'm pretty sure real user-facing usability is all about QD1 sequential R & W performance (and I'd guess R >> W), and then it's about price. So that's the 960 Pro on performance and the MX300 on price. Everything in between is the best QD1 sequential for the buck (probably why the best sellers are the 850EVOs and SSD PLUSs).
For laptops, replace MX300 with 600p I guess.
Jedi2155 - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
It would be nice if you could delineate the NVMe interfaced SSDs versus the SATA models. That way its easier to tell the performance between the two.Qostaarg - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
No samsung no party. performance like a potato.Gonemad - Tuesday, March 14, 2017 - link
For me it looks like a great alternative to my ageing rusty spinners for a boot drive on my 8 year old clunker.I won't even have to provision SATA or power cables for it, improving a little bit the cable clutter on my planned upgrade. Faster drives are on the too expensive side, cheaper drives are on the too slow side of the scale, so it becomes a good budget compromise by accident.
This guy has a weird place on the market, and I have a weird upgrade case to do from mechanical clatters, er, platters, so it fits.
Of course I will keep researching into options until the last minute.
jonathan1683 - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
I feel bad when companies make bad decisions like this. I often wonder who made these decisions or if they tried as hard as they could and just fell short. I really like WD as a company, but I see their future may be grim. Hopefully they get it together.