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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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.