The Western Digital WD Black SN750 SSD Review: Why Fix What Isn't Broken?
by Billy Tallis on January 18, 2019 8:01 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The WD Black SN750 provides only minor overall improvements over last year's model on the Heavy test. This leaves it with an average data rate that falls well short of the latest Silicon Motion-based drives when the test is run on an empty drive, but the full-drive performance of the WD Black is still excellent.
The average and 99th percentile latencies from the new WD Black are not significantly different from last year's model. The Corsair MP510 provides slightly better latency scores using the same flash, and the Silicon Motion SM2262EN-based drives are even faster when the test is run on an empty drive.
The average read and write latencies from the WD Black SN750 are a tiny bit better than the previous generation, but not enough to change the rankings significantly. The SN750 has one of the best average read latency scores for a full-drive test run, and its empty-drive read latency score comes closer to the best drives than either of its average write latency scores.
The WD Black SN750 and its predecessor show very little full-drive penalty to 99th percentile read or write latencies, and consequently they have some of the best full-drive QoS scores on the Heavy test. But when the test is run on an empty drive, several other drives score a bit better.
The SN750 is slightly more power efficient than its predecessor, bringing it very close to matching the WD Blue SATA SSD for efficiency while delivering almost three times the overall performance.
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iwod - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Patiently waiting for PCI-E 5.0 SSD, that is 16GB/s for 4x.Ryan Smith - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
So for what it's worth, the last time I talked to the PCI-SIG about PCIe 5, they were saying that they were expecting it to be used in conjunction with PCIe 4 rather than replacing it. The idea being that the PCIe x16 slot closest to the CPU would be a PCIe 5 slot, while everything else would be PCIe 4 due to the distances and signal integrity issues involved.If that's still the plan, then I wouldn't expect to see PCIe 5 SSDs, at least not in the M.2 form factor.
iwod - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
Thx. But surely Directly Attached NAND from SSD is more important? It is way more latency sensitive than GPU.I am wondering if we could get sort of like 20x Slot with 16x bandwidth. So 4x for SSD, and 8x * 2 for GPU.Most people are still using a single graphics card, I would be fine with 8x GPU PCI-E 5.0 and 4x for SSD.
Does that mean we might never see Thunderbolt 5 with PCI-E 5 signalling?
GreenReaper - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
Basically this is how PCIe 4 is likely to work for many existing AMD motherboards.ScouserPcgamer - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
The Seagate Firecuda wipes the floor of read/write speeds, this is like a 1% improvement over the 2018 modelLogitechFan - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
And then comes 970 Pro and wipes the floor with all of them and spits on their graves.LogitechFan - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
970 Pro is not on the list?! WTF is this, an Intel commercial?!Oxford Guy - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
What is and isn't tested is sometimes very strange here. The Nvidia GTX 960, for example, was never tested."Editor's Note: Due to personal matters we won’t have a GeForce GTX 960 review published today. But in lieu of that we wanted to go over the basics of NVIDIA’s latest Maxwell card"
Today or ever.
"Anyhow, that’s a wrap from us for now. Be sure to check back in early next week for our complete look at GeForce GTX 960, including performance, overclocking, HEVC support, and more."
Still waiting... Those promises were posted in 2015.
Oxford Guy - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
"Conspiracy theorists" claimed the card wasn't tested because it was a turkey, making Nvidia look bad.Has Anandtech staff ever explained why the promised review never materialized?
Ryan Smith - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
"Has Anandtech staff ever explained why the promised review never materialized?"Honestly, we're busy and despite our best efforts, sometimes bite off more than we can chew. Especially as we have imperfect vision about what products may show up on our doorsteps tomorrow.