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Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue Review: WD Enters the Consumer SSD Market

 by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 3, 2010 12:00 AM EST
64 Comments | Add A Comment
64 Comments

Random Read/Write Speed

This test reads/writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). I perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time.

I've had to run this test two different ways thanks to the way the newer controllers handle write alignment. Without a manually aligned partition, Windows XP executes writes on sector aligned boundaries while most modern OSes write with 4K alignment. Some controllers take this into account when mapping LBAs to page addresses, which generates additional overhead but makes for relatively similar performance regardless of OS/partition alignment. Other controllers skip the management overhead and just perform worse under Windows XP without partition alignment as file system writes are not automatically aligned with the SSD's internal pages.

First up is my traditional 4KB random write test, each write here is aligned to 512-byte sectors, similar to how Windows XP might write data to a drive:

4KB Random Write - MB/s

Random write performance is at the lower end of the Indilinx spectrum, but definitely competitive in that space. Obviously even as a slower SSD the SiliconEdge Blue is an order of magnitude faster than even the fastest desktop hard drives.

The chart below shows that the SiliconEdge Blue performs the same regardless of whether you align transfers to 4KB boundaries or not:

4K Aligned - 4KB Random Write - MB/s

Random read performance is the only area where Western Digital's SSD actually noticeably falls behind the Indilinx drives:

4KB Random Read - MB/s

At 21.8MB/s it's much faster than a hard drive, but a good ~15MB/s slower than an Indilinx drive. It is in the same class of performance as the Toshiba based SSDNow V+ and the Samsung RBB based drives.

Sequential Read/Write Speed Overall System Performance using PCMark Vantage
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  • Frallan - Friday, March 5, 2010 - link

    Performance isn't average its abyssimal. It can only compete with the other brands low-performance offers and is priced hicher then the High performance offers.

    I don't understand why WD turned up at the party at all - this deflates the good will that they still have.

    /F

  • capeconsultant - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - link

    Bigfoot? Nope. Smallfoot :)

  • vol7ron - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - link

    Anand,

    You're really pumping out the articles lately, you must be swamped!

    I just wanted to comment on your closing remarks: "It just strikes me as odd for hard drive manufacturers with decades of experience in firmware development and data access patterns, to not come out of the gates swinging."

    I'm sure you realize that the two technologies are almost completely different. Sure they have common components and similar storage logistics, but WD made it's way on the quality of the physical aspect and head speeds of hard disks.

    The comparison is almost the same as how floppy disks have been phased out by thumb drives, or film cameras being replaced with digital cameras. We didn't see those companies that excelled in the in the first generation of their technology come out swinging, did we? Verbatim and Kodak are still struggling.

    What's more surprising is not seeing a company with a big wallet to come out aiming for the fences. That's what I'd like to see, just like Intel.

    Cheers for another good article,
    vol7ron

  • 7Enigma - Thursday, March 4, 2010 - link

    Unfortunately you must have missed the FIRST sentence of the article. They purchased a large company that had a great deal of experience in the SSD arena.

    That kind of makes your comment moot.

  • The0ne - Monday, March 8, 2010 - link

    IF everything stayed the same than yes the point would be moot but sadly when acquisition happens changes are always in effect and mostly for the bad reasons. You can acquire the best SSD house in the world and bring it into your team with little experience in it and have them run it. Give it a few days and that "best" becomes WTF, guarantee.

  • vol7ron - Friday, March 5, 2010 - link

    Haha, you do go me there. :)

    Except, SiliconSystems is really a mock company and I use that term loosely. Even if you say they focused on CF, although it is more similar to SSD NAND, as a storage product it is still significantly different. I would say, though, that the combination of WDs current storage management, combined with some experience with the NAND controllers should have put out something better than this WD SSD.

    Still, WD acquired Silicon Systems in March of last year and (even then) I thought SS was an inexperienced company. They put out Enterprise/OEM products, that didn't really deal with speed, but more with reliability; more specifically, being able to recover from unforeseen power downs, data errors, etc. While that is very important, SSDs are supposed to provide speed and that's not something SS is known for.

    So, yes, I still stand by my statement. Still different technologies and a hard transition.

    vol7ron

  • Soltis - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - link

    lol... these drives are on the lower end of the performance spectrum and the higher end of the price spectrum..

    But who knows? maybe with this new "reliability" WD drives will now survive the trip to your house! ~zing

  • CTT - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - link

    A comprehensive/insightful article, as always. I would have a couple of remarks about the graphs though: the low values are printed over the drive names and the the WD drive is listed as JM618.

    I see the TRIM support is given the due attention, but there are quiet a few users that don't benefit from it (e.g. using Windows XP, TrueCrypt). Would it be too much trouble to ask for some tests with drive full/some percent free and TRIM disabled?

    Did the WD experienced any significant (read abysmal) drop in write performance after some use (such as HD Tune Pro benchmarks at Legit Reviews and StorageReview)?

  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - link

    I've been trying to figure out the best way to test performance in non-TRIM aware OSes. I'm playing around with some things and will eventually present my findings :)

    My drive didn't show any significant drop in write performance after use. That appears to be an issue with the HD Tune benchmark itself.

    Take care,
    Anand

  • Iketh - Saturday, March 6, 2010 - link

    Yes it's an issue with HD Tune. It sometimes reports my mechincal drives as reading 1/3 of what they normally do.
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