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.
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joesiv - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Micron was the manufacturer I was referring to.Other brands we've used which didn't exhibit the same poor endurance, ADATA, Kingston, Swissbit, Crucial
Some of them probably even use Micron NAND. I bet the NAND is fine on the Micron model we were using, perhaps the hardware is good but the software (firmware) wasn't? Of course we haven't tested every brand/model as our requirements were very specific, so I am sure there are other Micron models that are totally fine (kind of why i'd love to see anandtech include some endurance results, to help weed out the outliers)
sdsdv10 - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Interesting you write that Micron has problems and Crucial doesn't, as Crucial is just a consumer brand name for Micron Technology Inc.joesiv - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Well they were different models. The crucial was an old model that we were replacing with something new, since the old crucial drives were no longer available. It would be interesting to compare a crucial equivalent model though, I wonder if they share firmware.sovking - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Of course, these improvement will be welcomed, and I would like to see more in clear the steady state behaviour too.Regarding the endurance, we should take into account that most of these reviews are about consumer products. An NVME SSD for enterprise market has totally different performance: e.g regular steady state performance, higher endurance, higher reliability and so on. Sometimes, it's possible to find lightly used enterprise NVME drives at bargain price or at the cost of consumer drive: when this happens I prefer these drives.
joesiv - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
I think the role of a "consumer" is not perfectly defined these days. Are they the same as a "power user?" It would seem that more and more consumers are starting to do more and more serious workloads on their PCs. Obviously this is anecdotal, but with all the processing power at our disposal these days ("consumer" CPU's having 16 threads). People probably don't even know what the applications or services that they are running on their PC are doing.For example, a lot of commonly used applications will be running with a database system as their backend, whether it be a more simple sqlite database, or something more serious, those can be very write heavy, and they're often configured by the application without the user even knowing it. I'll bet that a lot of users even have web services running on their PC's, without actually thinking about it, all these API's that allow you to connect to your mobile devices/streaming appliances.
I'll bet a lot of people reading anandtech reviews even have their PC's running as a fileserver, or have a dedicated machine for such duties.
A lot of this stuff is stuff is stuff would be considered "enterprise" computing of yester-years. Why does anandtech run transcoding, rendering and "destroyer" style tests in their "consumer" reviews? Because it's relevant to some portion of the purchasing community.
Oxford Guy - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Considering how consumer parts have had endurance problems...Examples: OCZ Vertex 2 (with 64-bit NAND), Samsung 840 128 (terrible steady state performance, too), Samsung 840 and 840 EVO series (read speed loss), etc.
Endurance isn't just a matter of whether or not the drive dies or it has a lot of cell death. It's also a matter of performance consistency over time.
joesiv - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
I agree, I have bad memories of the early days of SSD's. I purchased a first generation intel SSD for $1000 (CND), the speeds were tested as being amazing compared to anything else on the market. But given the early learning curves with NAND controllers, and whatever the like, performance was terrible in the real world. I wasn't even able to upgrade the firmware since it was a first generation product, and only the subsequent versions supported the updates.Things have gotten better, but from my experience, it's been a rough road. Some manufacturers are a lot better than others for firmware development, and believe it or not a bug in the firmware can tank performance, or even tank your reliability, since the firmware is what controls wear leveling, and other new fangled features to give the maximum performance.
There are MLC drives that work in SLC mode dynamically to aid in performance, and other drives that are MLC NAND running SLC mode which have a hybrid endurance between the two. Some older drives did driver level compression to reduce NAND writes, while theoretically great, can cause problems for reliability if there are any cases where the data doesn't get committed correctly, especially in poor power conditions. Firmware bugs are rarely talked about, but a firmware bug could cause garbage collection to occur too often, which will take your performance and reliability.
gglaw - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
With current gen 3D NAND, it would take an incredible amount of writes to test endurance and the regional wholeseller RMA data averaged over hundreds of thousands of SSD's sold is much more representative than AT testing endurance on 1 drive they receive as a sample. It appears most SSD RMA's are NOT from using up the endurance cycles so that would make a 1 sample test by AT even less meaningful. If they happen to get a dud when 99% of that same model has a very good reliability history based on the broader market it would just make thousands of AT readers base their purchasing decision based on a sample size of 1.Billy Tallis - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
P/E ratings are highly dependent on what kind of error correction the NAND is used with. Even under pressure, the NAND manufacturers won't be able to give us more than just ballpark figures that would be tough to fairly compare between manufacturers.Last year (I think around when the first QLC drives showed up) I started recording SMART data before and after each phase of testing. I haven't written any code to parse and analyze that information yet, but it's on my to-do list.
I don't think the usual consumer SSD test suite does enough total drive writes to move the SMART indicators enough to form meaningful projections about write endurance and drive lifetime. To do that, I would have to set up another system to do long-term endurance testing on several drives at once. That's also on our wishlist, but it's a relatively low priority given the extra equipment and time requirements.
joesiv - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
@gglaw, @Billy Tallis, you guys are right, it's hard to get firm reliability numbers based off a short, small sample test. But to be honest, its' better than nothing. And as I said, seeing one example of an outlier that performs badly on the bench for the test would validate it's usefulness.gglaw, you are totally right, there is more to reliability than PE Cycles, I gave the examples of a drive that under our testing failed, with a life expectancy under a year, the same test scenario (which was a heavy real world workload for our product) on other similar rated drives did not fail the test. But I didn't mention that we had huge realiability issues with our previous drives (Kingston), where they were no where near the end of their endurance ratings, but were failing for other causes. Kingston attributed a lot of the failures to firmware bugs that weren't traceable in SMART data, and in some cases pure hardware failure.
Billy, yes in general you're right, it's hard to get meaningful projections for a short period of time, this is especially the case if you use percent life used as a metric (1-100). However, it's not too bad if you can get the PE Cycles, which typically are 3000 for MLC, and in some cases 2500 for 3D NAND, instead of waiting months for a single change in percent life change, we have seen drives go through 1 PE Cycle a day, which would give us around 8 years of product life (baring other failures), we were going through 5-6 PE Cycles a day on the Micron drive, which was a huge warning sign. That would be a great case for anandtech finding the poor endurance outliers.