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
Random Read Performance
Our first test of random read performance uses very short bursts of operations issued one at a time with no queuing. The drives are given enough idle time between bursts to yield an overall duty cycle of 20%, so thermal throttling is impossible. Each burst consists of a total of 32MB of 4kB random reads, from a 16GB span of the disk. The total data read is 1GB.
The burst random read performance of the WD Black isn't exceptional, but it is an improvement over the original WD Black SSD and is only slightly behind the Samsung 960 EVO.
Our sustained random read performance is similar to the random read test from our 2015 test suite: queue depths from 1 to 32 are tested, and the average performance and power efficiency across QD1, QD2 and QD4 are reported as the primary scores. Each queue depth is tested for one minute or 32GB of data transferred, whichever is shorter. After each queue depth is tested, the drive is given up to one minute to cool off so that the higher queue depths are unlikely to be affected by accumulated heat build-up. The individual read operations are again 4kB, and cover a 64GB span of the drive.
The sustained random read performance of the WD Black is a small improvement over last year's model, but not quite enough to catch up to Samsung. In addition, the recent Intel 760p also comes out slightly ahead of the WD Black.
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| Power Efficiency in MB/s/W | Average Power in W | ||||||||
The power efficiency of the WD Black during random reads is better than any other TLC drive as it barely draws any more power than a SATA drive during this test.
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At higher queue depths, the Samsung drives build a small performance lead over the WD Black, but most other drives fall far behind as the queue depth increases.
Random Write Performance
Our test of random write burst performance is structured similarly to the random read burst test, but each burst is only 4MB and the total test length is 128MB. The 4kB random write operations are distributed over a 16GB span of the drive, and the operations are issued one at a time with no queuing.
Our WD Black sample oddly returned a substantially better burst random write score than the SanDisk Extreme PRO that should be identical. Since both scores are at the top of the chart, unusually high variance doesn't actually present a problem.
As with the sustained random read test, our sustained 4kB random write test runs for up to one minute or 32GB per queue depth, covering a 64GB span of the drive and giving the drive up to 1 minute of idle time between queue depths to allow for write caches to be flushed and for the drive to cool down.
The new WD Black offers top-tier performance on the sustained random write test, well ahead of Samsung's current retail offerings and just barely behind the PM981 OEM drive that Samsung's next generation retail drives will be based upon. Last year's WD Black was just barely faster than SATA drives.
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| Power Efficiency in MB/s/W | Average Power in W | ||||||||
The overhaul of the NAND and the controller has taken the WD Black from the bottom of the efficiency chart with last year's model to the very top, where it has a small lead over the Toshiba XG5 and Samsung 960 PRO.
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The WD Black's random write performance saturates at QD4 while the Samsung drives and several other models continue improving and can hit much higher performance levels at high queue depths. However, the WD Black has all the random write performance it needs at the more important low queue depths.
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Mr Perfect - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
On one hand I appreciate having a mechanical in the charts to see how these SSDs compare, since it's a great way to show the benefits of upgrading to one. On the other hand it makes the SSD results really hard to read, as they become disappearingly small. Hopefully one day we won't have to show people the difference.Billy Tallis - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
It's not something I plan to include in most reviews. I only added it for this one because the mechanical drive I happened to have on hand to benchmark was also a 1TB WD Black. On a lot of reviews, I leave out Optane drives for the same reasons.amar.znzi - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
> The new controller has a tri-core architecture (probably using Arm Cortex-R cores) fabricated in a 28nm process.Please don't speculate. Can you confirm with WD which Instruction Set Architecture is being used?
Billy Tallis - Sunday, April 8, 2018 - link
We asked repeatedly, and all we could get was that it isn't RISC-V. But every other NVMe controller used in consumer SSDs uses Cortex-R, and there's no reason to suspect WD is doing anything different. There aren't many alternatives. They designed this controller architecture to put as much of the important functionality on dedicated hardware as possible, so doing something unusual with the CPU cores doesn't present much opportunity for improving performance or efficiency.Klimax - Sunday, April 8, 2018 - link
Maybe ARC. (Intel uses it for some of their MEs)amar.znzi - Saturday, April 14, 2018 - link
Oh, it's not. WD has anounced that it intends to transition a large volume of it's products to RISC-V. Thanks, that answered my question.HStewart - Sunday, April 8, 2018 - link
One question, I have is there any real advantage of using this model version cheaper model - in an USB-C Gen 2 case?SanX - Sunday, April 8, 2018 - link
Which tasks will benefit from fast drives and which will not in real life ? Will Antivirus full clean go faster then 3-4 days currently? Or archieving? Or search for file with specific content? Having 10x read speed will loading Windows go 10x faster then with neanderthal mechanical Western Digital Gold hard drives or only by mere 10%? That what I like to see as tests not that semi-nonsence which resembles proverbial fake news of political media.Good would be to see the temperature map on a heavy load, the 10, 13 and even on some drives 20 Watts for such small formfactor is a lot.
Also I still keep for history some old hard drives which don't giveup their life after 30 years. Will these new ones with guaranteed 5 years then disintegrate after 10?
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - link
Most people don't keep their hard drives for 30 years, as the interface connector is far obsolete by now. I'm not even certain that IDE/PATA goes back that far, and you'd most likely need a highly specialized product to even read/write to that drive. 10 years for an SSD is a reasonable lifespan, as you'd probably upgrade to something faster or denser after that time.Rami Meir - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
I would like to see:1. 2TB 2280 and 4TB 22110
2. IOPS performance @ QD=1
P.S. SW Drivers available at www.nvmexpress.org
Warranty period directly calculated based on the Endurance fures