The Western Digital WD Black SN750 SSD Review: Why Fix What Isn't Broken?
by Billy Tallis on January 18, 2019 8:01 AM ESTConclusion
The new WD Black SN750 changes little from last year's model. Since it uses the same controller and NAND flash memory as the previous WD Black, the SN750 had little room for improvement. With optimized firmware for WD's still relatively new in-house NVMe controller architecture, the SN750 manages to mostly avoid performance regressions and deliver fairly consistent performance and efficiency improvements of a few percent. For all practical purposes, the new WD Black SN750 can be regarded as more or less identical to its predecessor, except that the SN750 is launching at far better prices, and will soon be adding a 2TB model.
By 2018 standards, the new WD Black is still a very competitive high-end NVMe SSD, and probably the best overall SSD using Toshiba/SanDisk 3D NAND. But the WD Black SN750 is hardly the only new competitor in this space that we'll see in 2019. Drives using Silicon Motion's SM2262EN controller and Micron 64-layer 3D NAND started to hit the market by the end of 2018, and we'll have reviews of two of them soon (the ADATA SX8200 Pro and HP EX950). Some companies will also be introducing 96-layer 3D NAND—Samsung announced last fall that the 970 EVO would be replaced by a 970 EVO Plus that updates the NAND but keeps the same controller, and Plextor's M10Pe should land in the second half of the year.
Western Digital may come to regret their decision to make the SN750 such a minimal update over last year's model, because it doesn't appear that their competition will be sitting still. PCIe 4.0 will hit the consumer market later this year and Phison at least will be ready with a new controller. The transition to 96L 3D NAND will also be driving demand for a new generation of controllers, because the next-generation NAND supports higher IO speeds than many current controllers. We probably won't hear of any specific product announcements until Computex at the earliest, but by the end of 2019 there's a good chance we'll see several new SSDs that make all the major upgrades Western Digital avoided this time around.
Overall, WD's first in-house NVMe controller looks good to go for another year, but Western Digital will need a significant controller update for 2020 and they'll need to move to 96L by then. They were well positioned to get by with such a minor update to the WD Black, but now they are vulnerable to falling behind should any of their competitors execute well on a significant hardware upgrade sometime this year. The SN750 may not stay at the top for long.
| 240-280GB | 480-512GB | 960GB-1TB | 2TB | |
| Western Digital WD Black SN750 (MSRP) | $79.99 (32¢/GB) | $129.99 (26¢/GB) | $249.99 (25¢/GB) | $499.99 (25¢/GB) |
| Western Digital WD Black (2018) | $79.99 (32¢/GB) | $119.99 (24¢/GB) | $226.99 (23¢/GB) | |
| ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro | $74.99 (29¢/GB) | $114.99 (22¢/GB) | $199.95 (20¢/GB) | |
| HP EX920 | $57.99 (23¢/GB) | $89.99 (18¢/GB) | $174.99 (17¢/GB) | |
| Mushkin Pilot | $59.99 (24¢/GB) | $99.99 (20¢/GB) | $189.99 (19¢/GB) | $399.99 (20¢/GB) |
| MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro | $54.99 (23¢/GB) | $99.99 (21¢/GB) | ||
| Corsair Force MP510 | $74.19 (31¢/GB) | $113.99 (24¢/GB) | $209.99 (22¢/GB) | $386.99 (20¢/GB) |
| Samsung 970 EVO | $77.99 (31¢/GB) | $127.93 (26¢/GB) | $247.99 (25¢/GB) | $497.99 (25¢/GB) |
The initial MSRPs for the new WD Black are slightly higher than the current street prices for last year's model, but once the SN750 has been in stock for a little while it should get down to match those retail prices. That will still leave it at a premium relative to Silicon Motion based drives, even the ADATA SX8200 Pro that uses the SM2262EN controller compared to the older SM2262 used by the HP EX920 and Mushkin Pilot. The Phison E12-based MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro is very well-priced for the capacities that are actually in stock at the moment, and the similar Corsair MP510 has pretty good pricing on the larger models.
The WD Black SN750 will be hitting the market most closely priced to the Samsung 970 EVO. In those conditions, the SN750 will be the obvious choice for laptop usage due to its great power efficiency. For desktop usage, the Samsung 970 EVO may be the slightly better performer overall, but the smart pick would usually be one of the cheaper SM2262(EN) drives. Their performance pitfalls are a bit more severe than the corner cases of the 970 EVO or the WD Black, but those scenarios are seldom encountered during real-world usage.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
54 Comments
View All Comments
namechamps - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Strangely enough I don't think anandtech has ever reviewed the 970 Pro which is likely why it isn't in the comparison. They have done the 960 pro and the 970 evo but not the 970 pro.Ryan Smith - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
"Whatever happend to the Samsung PRO in those comparisons?"Unfortunately Samsung never sampled the 970 PRO, so we don't have it on hand. And all indications are that they're just about done with it, having never released a 2TB version (like they did the 960 PRO).
I'm really not sure if we're going to see any new consumer MLC drives in 2019. The market has bifurcated into TLC and then more boutique solutions like Z-NAND and 3D XPoint.
althaz - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
The 512Gb drive is a ~$150 part, just buy it and test it? To many this remains the most prestigious tech site around for at least some things. SSDs have been one of those things. Not having the latest of Samsung's pro drive in your results kinda makes this whole thing not worth it, IMO.If you need an excuse do a "MLC Redux" review where you look at what was probably the faster ever MLC drive and talk about how SSD tech has changed.
eldakka - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
" just buy it and test it?"I'm sure anandtech would be delighted to test it if you sample one to them, or donate $150 to them to purchase one with.
GreenReaper - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
This is the level of a business expense though. Even if you did one a day for every day of the year it would be $53,400. OK, you could get a full-time journalist for that in some places, but that assumes they are kept and not sold on or used for anything else.Solandri - Monday, January 21, 2019 - link
More troubling is that unwillingness to buy a product for review smacks of demanding bribes. "Give us a free sample or we won't review your product." Which implies that companies which shower the reviewer with gifts will get more favorable reviews.Ideally, a review site should *never* accept free samples, and do all their product reviews with samples bought from the store. That's the only way to completely eliminate any undue influence the product manufacturer may have on the product review.
Dark_wizzie - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
I don't think they actually reviewed the 970 Pro?StevoLincolnite - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
Yeah. Comparisons have been a bit crap on Anandtech lately.The RTX 2080 review is lacking a good lineup of GPU's to compare with... Despite promises of "Adding more later". (Never happened sadly.)
joesiv - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
I would love to see at least some endurance testing in anandtechs reviews. I think it's something that's missing pretty much all SSD testing I see. Yes, speed is great, but endurance is something perspective owners will care more about in the long term.NAND technology is changing over time, is it changing for the better? More layers, but often at the expense of P/E Cycles.
SSD Firmwares as well have gotten both a lot more reliable, but also a lot more complicated, with different companies doing different things to maximize performance and also endurance.
Without testing these things, we don't know if there are duds in terms of firmwares/drives that don't strike a good balance between performance/reliability.
Bare minimimum I would love to see ananadtech do the following:
- Talk to manufacturers about the actual specifications of the NAND, what is the P/E Cycle rating for the NAND. Then list it in the specs for the drives so we can do our own research/homework if we want to. This spec is very often missed in the most marketing material.
- Do a quick capture of the SMART data at the very start of the testing
- Do a capture of the SMART data at the very end of your testing.
- Check out the Block Erase Count specifically. The Average Block Erase count would give a good approximation of how much life you've used just within your benchmark suite. It's much more grainular than Percent Life Used. This SMART attribute can vary between different manufacturer/firmware/controllers, so you might need to contact the manufacturer for this info.
In the end, you'll have something like: Rated P/E count / Average Block Erase, and since your test suite is likely pretty similar between SSD's, it would be a useful metric.
Bonus points, you could also look at NAND writes (not to be confused with Host Writes), during your testing, as it's related to life expectancy and can be corrolated with Total Byte Written.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that some drives write a lot more to NAND than you are expecting, and thus have higher Average Block Erases during your testing.
At my company when I did this test, while we were evaluating a drive for our products, Tier 1 memory manufacturers and their drives, failed bitterly at this endurance test where most did fine. I attribute this to the firmware. Working with the firmware developement team, we determined that the fix would not be feasible in that generation of product, so we had to skip that product.
Specs aren't everything, we need to test it, endurance is an important aspect, and I'd love to see it represented in your reviews.
romrunning - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Whom do you consider to be "Tier 1 memory manufacturers" - Samsung or Intel? I can't imagine their products failing endurance tests. Or are you talking about those you would consider to be lower than Samsung - like AData, Team Group, etc. - as a Tier 2 or Tier 3?