The Western Digital WD Black 3D NAND SSD Review: EVO Meets Its Match
by Ganesh T S & Billy Tallis on April 5, 2018 9:45 AM EST- Posted in
- SSDs
- Storage
- Western Digital
- SanDisk
- NVMe
- Extreme Pro
- WD Black
AnandTech 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, 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. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The average data rate from the new WD Black on The Destroyer is almost as fast as Samsung's TLC-based 960 EVO and their newer PM981 OEM drive. Where the original WD Black NVMe SSD was clearly a low-end NVMe drive and no faster than SATA SSDs on this test, the new WD Black is competitive at the high end.
The average latencies from the WD Black are competitive with Samsung's TLC drives, and the 99th percentile latencies are the fastest we've seen from any flash-based SSD for this capacity class.
The average read latencies from the WD Black on The Destroyer are as good as any flash-based SSD we've tested. Average write latencies are great but Samsung's top drives are still clearly faster.
The WD Black has the best 99th percentile read latency scores aside from Intel's Optane SSD 900P, but the 99th percentile write latency scores are only in the second tier of drives.
The load power consumption of the new WD Black is a huge improvement over the previous SSD to bear this name. The new model uses less than half as much energy over the course of The Destroyer, putting it in first place slightly ahead of the Toshiba XG5.
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boeush - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
You're going a bit overboard here with the paranoia.The ATSB Heavy and Light tests are designed to represent performance under normal use by power-wistful and typical consumers, respectively. So if you actually care about real-world performance, those results are enough. (And arguably, even the (ab)use as an Enterprise drive scenario, is largely addressed by the ATSB Destroyer test.)
FreckledTrout - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Agree boeush, ihe QD32 that was omitted really just makes some drives look like they are higher performing but in 99+% use cases that is misleading since its very hard to hit a queue depth of 32 in desktop usage.MrSpadge - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
+1 @ boeush (just posting for your statistics, iter)Reflex - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Nobody on this site works for you, you don't get to define their job.DanD85 - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Such arrogant attitude! Did you pay Anandtech's staff well enough to make such demand? If you don't find what you seek here, feel free to go elsewhere.Manch - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
I don't care about the test. There. Along with the rest telling you to STFU your request statistically speaking is of little interest.Don't let the back button hit you on the way out, you ass.
Spunjji - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
You're not his boss. Go home.FwFred - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
It would be useful for me for an article which steps back and looks at various storage technologies (new and old) and measure their impact on consumer usages.For example, how much would I gain from upgrading my ancient 840 EVO to a new NVME drive or even Optane.
msabercr - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
99th percentile results are performance consistency testing.Although, that's typically only important in DC devices which are typically not made in m.2 form factors.
jjj - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Good that perf is ok, especially after last year's model but the price is no fun. do we still need an 80% premium over mainstream SATA?