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 - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The average data rates from the new WD Black SSD on the Heavy test are essentially tied with the Samsung 960 EVO. Premium drives like the Samsung 960 PRO and Intel Optane SSD 900P are faster, but the WD Black and SanDisk Extreme PRO NVMe SSDs still clearly belong in the high-end market segment.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores from the WD Black on the Heavy test are among the best from any flash-based SSD. The 99th percentile write latency of the WD Black shows much less performance loss from a full drive than the Toshiba XG5 or Samsung 960 EVO.
The WD Black is one of the top drives for average read latency, and the average write latency is only slightly higher than that of the Samsung 960 EVO. The performance hit when the test is run on a full drive is no worse than what most MLC-based drives suffer.
Western Digital's new controller architecture provides great QoS for read operations, with 99th percentile latencies lower than any of the competing flash-based SSDs. The 99th percentile write latencies are top notch but don't stand out from the crowd.
The WD Black and SanDisk Extreme PRO join the Toshiba XG5 as some of the few NVMe SSDs that offer load power efficiency comparable to good SATA SSDs. The total energy used during the heavy test is only slightly higher than the Crucial MX500 and Western Digital's own SATA drives with the same 64L 3D TLC NAND.
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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?