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
Mixed Random Performance
Our test of mixed random reads and writes covers mixes varying from pure reads to pure writes at 10% increments. Each mix is tested for up to 1 minute or 32GB of data transferred. The test is conducted with a queue depth of 4, and is limited to a 64GB span of the drive. In between each mix, the drive is given idle time of up to one minute so that the overall duty cycle is 50%.
The WD Black offers great mixed random I/O performance, but it is still slightly slower overall than the best drives from Samsung, and the Optane SSD is in an entirely different league.
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| Power Efficiency in MB/s/W | Average Power in W | ||||||||
The WD Black's power efficiency on the mixed random I/O test is about the same as that of the Samsung 960 PRO, and close to the Optane SSD in spite of the vast difference in absolute performance level.
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The performance of the WD Black grows very slowly as the workload shifts from reads toward writes, but near the end of the test the good SLC write caching implementation gives the WD Black steep gains. Power consumption is under 2W for most of the test and doesn't quite reach 4W at the very end.
Mixed Sequential Performance
Our test of mixed sequential reads and writes differs from the mixed random I/O test by performing 128kB sequential accesses rather than 4kB accesses at random locations, and the sequential test is conducted at queue depth 1. The range of mixes tested is the same, and the timing and limits on data transfers are also the same as above.
The mixed sequential workload performance of the WD Black is surprisingly good, just barely behind the Optane SSD and far ahead of almost all flash-based SSDs.
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| Power Efficiency in MB/s/W | Average Power in W | ||||||||
The WD Black draws about the same power as other SSDs during the mixed sequential test, and combined with the great performance that translates to a huge lead in power efficiency.
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The performance scaling pattern of the WD Black on the mixed sequential test is quite unusual. Many drives show a bathtub curve with peak performance at either end of the test when the workload is pure reads or pure writes, and the worst performance in the middle of the test. By contrast, the WD Black starts out rather slowly but rapidly speeds up during the first half of the test, and stays near full performance for the entire second half.
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boeush - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
See the respective Destroyer, Heavy, and Light ATSB results - and match up your version of "real world" to the respective test scenario...The_Assimilator - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
A new SSD controller that doesn't perform like shit is excellent news for a market that's seen Samsung ruling the roost for far too long. Hopefully this will be the beginning of price drops for NVMe drives that don't suck, and the beginning of the end of NVMe drives that are just SATA devices in an M.2 form factor.darckhart - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
any TCG OPAL encryption in WD or Sandisk?tommo1982 - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
It's interesting how Optane is not so much better in Destroyer/Heavy/Light tests. I expected it to lead in most of them, but found Samsung and WD's drives to match or beat it. With the recent hype around X-Point I was hoping for it to be a considerable improvement over NAND. It seems Intel doesn't deliver. Not for the average user at least.zodiacfml - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
Controller and lack of parallelism. The memory chip is insane. Intel needs to improve their volumes so that they can produce higher capacity drives, giving more capacity and performance at the same costs today.This is probably the reason why Intel seems aggressive now with Optane, bundling and branding it with the new Coffee Lake chips.
CheapSushi - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
Plus still waiting on x4 PCIe laned M.2 Optanes.CheapSushi - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
Isn't it because those other drives have a lot more RAM and RAM still beats phase change? Optane is still better is many other regards but choices of course depend on more variables.tamalero - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
I dont get it, how they claim its competition when WD's performance is absolutely abysmal compared to the EVOs.tamalero - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Disregard my comment. Turns out I was checking the blue instead of the orange bars.What a monstrous difference in performance compared to the prior models!
Billy Tallis - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
We did warn Western Digital that they weren't doing enough to separate the branding of last year's model and this year's model. I expect a lot of confusion and disappointment over the next few months until the old models are no longer available for purchase.