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
Conclusion
We knew from tests last year of Western Digital's SATA drives and the Toshiba XG5 that the SanDisk/Toshiba 64-layer 3D TLC was a huge improvement over their planar NAND, and possibly was even the fastest and most power efficient TLC NAND yet. It is now clear that those drives weren't even making the best possible use of that flash. With Western Digital's new in-house controller, the BiCS 3 TLC really shines. The new WD Black and SanDisk Extreme PRO are unquestionably high-end NVMe SSDs that match the Samsung 960 EVO and sometimes even beat the 960 PRO.
There are very few disappointing results from the WD Black. Even when it isn't tied for first or second place, it performs well above the low-end NVMe drives. The two biggest problems appear to be a poor start to the sequential read test, and another round of NVMe idle power management bugs to puzzle through. Almost all NVMe drives have at least some quirks when it comes to idle power management, in stark contrast to the nearly universal and flawless support among SATA drives for at least the slumber state and usually also DevSleep (which cannot be used on desktops). The power efficiency of the WD Black under load is excellent, so it is clear that the Western Digital NVMe controller isn't inherently a power hog. Whatever incompatibility the WD Black's power management currently has with our testbed won't matter to other desktop users, and hopefully isn't representative of today's notebooks. The bigger surprises from the WD Black are when it performs much better than expected, especially during the mixed sequential I/O test where nothing comes close.
Samsung established an early lead in the NVMe SSD race and has held on to their top spot as many brands have tried and failed to introduce high-end NVMe SSDs with either planar NAND or the lackluster first-generation Intel/Micron 3D NAND. None of those SSDs was a more obvious underachiever than the original WD Black NVMe SSD from last year, which used 15nm planar TLC and could barely outperform a decent SATA drive. The first WD Black SSD didn't deserve Western Digital's high-performance branding. This new WD Black is everything last year's model should have been, and it should be able to stay relevant throughout this year even when Samsung gets around to releasing the successors to the 960 PRO and 960 EVO—which they really need to do soon.
| NVMe SSD Price Comparison | ||||
| 120-128GB | 240-256GB | 400-512GB | 960-1200GB | |
| WD Black (3D NAND) SanDisk Extreme PRO |
$119.99 (48¢/GB) | $226.75 (45¢/GB) | $449.99 (45¢/GB) | |
| Intel SSD 760p | $88.32 (69¢/GB) | $122.25 (48¢/GB) | $223.26 (44¢/GB) | $471.52 (46¢/GB) |
| Samsung 960 PRO | $327.99 (64¢/GB) | $608.70 (59¢/GB) | ||
| Samsung 960 EVO | $119.99 (48¢/GB) | $199.99 (40¢/GB) | $449.99 (45¢/GB) | |
| WD Black (2D NAND) | $104.28 (41¢/GB) | $182.00 (36¢/GB) | ||
| Plextor M9Pe | $119.99 (47¢/GB) | $213.43 (42¢/GB) | $408.26 (40¢/GB) | |
| MyDigitalSSD SBX | $59.99 (47¢/GB) | $99.99 (39¢/GB) | $159.99 (31¢/GB) | $339.99 (33¢/GB) |
| Toshiba OCZ RD400 | $109.99 (86¢/GB) | $114.99 (45¢/GB) | $309.99 (61¢/GB) | $466.45 (46¢/GB) |
The MSRPs for the WD Black roughly match current street prices for the Samsung 960 EVO, which is exactly what the WD Black should be competing against. Neither drive has a clear overall performance advantage in the 1TB capacity we've analyzed with this review, though the WD Black has a modest power efficiency advantage (our idle power problems notwithstanding). Since release, the Intel 760p has also climbed up to this price range, and it doesn't belong there.
The Plextor M9Pe is finally available for purchase after a paper launch early this year. It uses Toshiba's 64L TLC and a Marvell controller, so it closely represents what this year's WD Black would have been without Western Digital's new in-house controller. We will have preformance results for the M9Pe soon.
Western Digital's long years working to develop 3D NAND and their new NVMe controller have paid off. They're once again a credible contender in the high end space, and their latest SATA SSDs are doing pretty well, too. This year's SSD market now has serious competition in almost every price bracket.
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Cooe - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
This is why the 250GB 960 EVO (and inevitably for the new WD Black as well) is far and away the most popular SKU just about everywhere. At around $110-120 vs $80-90, you're only paying a premium of around 20-25% over an equivalent tiered SATA III drive (ala an 850/860 EVO), though yes, you are sacrificing your sequential write speeds past the 13GB Turbowrite cache to just 300MB/s to get that comparatively tiny price premium for good NVMe vs SATA-III ratio.Tbh though in most general consumer PC workloads the above simply isn't an issue, as sustained writes of >13GB are few & far between, and the cache turnover speed while idling is speedy quick. I think this is exactly the reason why Western Digital & SanDisk adopted the kind of handicapped nCache 2.0 into a very Turbowrite-esque system with nCache 3.0 (but more like 850 EVO's simplier static TW cache just a lot bigger, rather a dynamic one like the 960 EVO uses).
Dragonstongue - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
competition is good, but not if they all want to keep pricing within a few $ of each other IMO.for nvme/M.2 drives they need to make sure is more universal that it is more plug and play so consumers can be assured it will work on their motherboard as a bootable OS drive right off the bat without driver specific support (quite a few drives quite a few no matter on Intel or AMD chipset seem to have this issue hence they need more plug and play support)
costs more than a normal sata based one (performance is much higher though that does not always mean can see this difference) but having to screw around making the bios/windows able to use the drive in question sucks (not saying this is a problem with this specific model, but it is a problem)
nice write up though ^.^
PeachNCream - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
I agree with you on pricing. It would be good if WD had priced their drive a bit lower in order to force Samsung to respond since they have a competitive product, but they have to get a return on development costs so it's safe for them to match Samsung's price. I don't like it because the consumer isn't realizing a benefit in additional competition if neither company budges on cost, but I can understand the business justifications that are probably behind it.Cliff34 - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
What I do wish is that the m2 sata drives should be the same price as sata ssd. After all, the specs are the same just diff forms. Too bad for us consumers.The_Assimilator - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
M.2 SATA drives should cost *less* than their 2.5" equivalents, and the 2.5" drives should simply be an M.2 drives in an enclosure with an M.2-to-SATA connector.Cliff34 - Saturday, April 7, 2018 - link
It should but it doesn't. My guess is because m2 form is a niche market because most computer accept SATA. Therefore, companies can charge more because they can get away with it. Unless there's a huge swing of adoption of m2 form for desktop and laptops, m2 will always cost more than SATA.zodiacfml - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
True.wr3zzz - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
WD's pricing strategy is probably indicative that current demand for NVMe is still outpacing supply.Arbie - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Great article and follow-up analysis of the tests; thanks.iwod - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
What are the difference in real world usage? We thought we needed better QD1, and even that doesn't return any significant difference in optane.