The Western Digital WD Black 3D NAND SSD Review: EVO Meets Its Match

Power Management

Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.

SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.

Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.

We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled.

Like most NVMe SSDs, the WD Black has a fairly high active idle power draw—the cost of keeping a PCIe 3 x4 link active. The active idle power is a bit higher than the previous WD Black SSD but is in line with drives from Samsung, Toshiba and Phison.

Enabling all the advanced PCIe and NVMe power management features doesn't have the desired effect on the WD Black SSD. The drops by almost half, but it should have dropped by at least an order of magnitude. The original WD Black SSD used aggressive power management whether or not the operating system requested it. The new WD Black seems to be unable to save much power when used on our desktop testbed, no matter what NVMe power states are requested. We will work with Western Digital to try to isolate the cause of this poor behavior. In the meantime, the WD Black is hardly the only NVMe drive where power management has problems out of the box, but Intel and Samsung have managed to produce drives that achieve very low idle power on our testbed with little or no tuning required.

Since the WD Black is clearly unable to engage its full array of power management capabilities on our testbed, it is unsurprising to see that its wake-up latency is quite short. It is not the minimal ~15µs we usually observe from drives that aren't enabling any power savings at all, but ~230µs is still a very quick wake-up from sleep.