One Design, Two Products: The SanDisk Ultra 3D (1TB) and WD Blue 3D (1TB) SSD Reviews, with BiCS 3D NAND
by Billy Tallis on September 14, 2017 9:00 AM ESTPower Management
Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.
SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.
We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled.
Orange is for the new drives, Blue is for the previous generation models
Not much has changed with the power management situation for the WD and SanDisk drives; they're still using the same Marvell 88SS1074 controller, and the choice of NAND doesn't have much effect on idle power. Both active idle and slumber state idle power draw are good.
The idle wake-up latency of the WD/SanDisk drives is plenty quick, but not quite as fast as the Phison-based drives. The drives that most often outperform the WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D all take several times longer to wake up from idle.
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Foeketijn - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
We are talking about a Watt. Difference or so. Adding an extra fan has more impact. (Laptop? Who is upgrading a laptop with an 2,5" disk? Those are only found in really cheap devices anyway) The evo is known to just keep on going way way over that endurance point. How will these fare? We don't know yet. I think he has a fair point. There is no logical reason to choose this over a samsung other than not liking samsung. And samsung is just sitting there waiting till people notice their m2 driver are creaping to their sata prices. For a couple dollar more you get benchmarks that don't fit in these diagrams. I'm not a samsung fan. Just sad that no one is even trying to win this fight. The 850 evo is almost 3 years old and still on top for it's pricepoint (250Gb it is)mapesdhs - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
Indeed, so until I see tech akin to the 850 EVO come back down to the 55 UKP level for 250GB where it was at a couple of years ago, I just keep hunting for new or lighly used 840 Pro or other models via normal auction, bagged another 840 Pro 256GB recently for 51 UKP; would be fascinating to see how this model and others from previous generations of good SSDs would fare in these tests (Vertex4, Neutron GTX, Extreme Pro, Vector, etc.) Except for power consumption (who cares in a desktop), I doubt the latest models are that much better at all. I miss the days of buying an 850 EVO 500GB for 118 UKP (that was Oct/2015).Until then, there's better value in NVMe models with addin card adapters, eg. SM951.
Luckz - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
When talking pound prices, it might be reasonable to mention how much your currency has changed since the 840 came out.Rictorhell - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
Hoping for someone, other than Samsung, to come up with a viable and somewhat affordable 4tb ssd, sata, or otherwise, so that prices at or near that capacity will become at least somewhat reasonable, someday, for those of us that need/want that capacity in an ssd.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
That would be nice, but for now, you could just buy two SSDs and RAID them together?mapesdhs - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
That's one heck of a reliability risk.MajGenRelativity - Friday, September 15, 2017 - link
Depending on the RAID type, your reliability risk would be the same, or better. Could be worse, but that would be if you were doing a striped volume, which only increases performance, and I don't think OP was looking for thatCheapSushi - Sunday, September 17, 2017 - link
Yeah, so is having 1 PSU, no redundant power from difference sources, so is not having ECC RAM usually because anyone that does something with their computer is looking for six nines in uptime because they're obviously a datacenter...TheinsanegamerN - Sunday, September 17, 2017 - link
So is keeping 4TB of data on a single drive that can fail without warning.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
Nice drives for a reasonable price and finally Samsung is starting to see a few competitive products but I don't think the focus is on SATA SSDs at this point. They're commonplace, but because the drive interface is limiting performance, we're unlikely to see any further high performance storage products for SATA which may explain why Samsung's not fighting very hard to keep a top tier drive there. They need mainstream and/or cost-effective storage which are essentially what SanDisk/WD, Crucial, and every other company that sells SATA SSDs ships out now. There's nothing wrong with that situation. I'm still on SATA and perfectly happy with the product selection out there now, but there's not much envelope left to push without shifting to interfaces like NVMe.