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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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.