The Western Digital WD Black 3D NAND SSD Review: EVO Meets Its Match
by Ganesh T S & Billy Tallis on April 5, 2018 9:45 AM EST- Posted in
- SSDs
- Storage
- Western Digital
- SanDisk
- NVMe
- Extreme Pro
- WD Black
AnandTech 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 average data rates from the new WD Black SSD on the Heavy test are essentially tied with the Samsung 960 EVO. Premium drives like the Samsung 960 PRO and Intel Optane SSD 900P are faster, but the WD Black and SanDisk Extreme PRO NVMe SSDs still clearly belong in the high-end market segment.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores from the WD Black on the Heavy test are among the best from any flash-based SSD. The 99th percentile write latency of the WD Black shows much less performance loss from a full drive than the Toshiba XG5 or Samsung 960 EVO.
The WD Black is one of the top drives for average read latency, and the average write latency is only slightly higher than that of the Samsung 960 EVO. The performance hit when the test is run on a full drive is no worse than what most MLC-based drives suffer.
Western Digital's new controller architecture provides great QoS for read operations, with 99th percentile latencies lower than any of the competing flash-based SSDs. The 99th percentile write latencies are top notch but don't stand out from the crowd.
The WD Black and SanDisk Extreme PRO join the Toshiba XG5 as some of the few NVMe SSDs that offer load power efficiency comparable to good SATA SSDs. The total energy used during the heavy test is only slightly higher than the Crucial MX500 and Western Digital's own SATA drives with the same 64L 3D TLC NAND.
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boeush - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
See the respective Destroyer, Heavy, and Light ATSB results - and match up your version of "real world" to the respective test scenario...The_Assimilator - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
A new SSD controller that doesn't perform like shit is excellent news for a market that's seen Samsung ruling the roost for far too long. Hopefully this will be the beginning of price drops for NVMe drives that don't suck, and the beginning of the end of NVMe drives that are just SATA devices in an M.2 form factor.darckhart - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
any TCG OPAL encryption in WD or Sandisk?tommo1982 - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
It's interesting how Optane is not so much better in Destroyer/Heavy/Light tests. I expected it to lead in most of them, but found Samsung and WD's drives to match or beat it. With the recent hype around X-Point I was hoping for it to be a considerable improvement over NAND. It seems Intel doesn't deliver. Not for the average user at least.zodiacfml - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
Controller and lack of parallelism. The memory chip is insane. Intel needs to improve their volumes so that they can produce higher capacity drives, giving more capacity and performance at the same costs today.This is probably the reason why Intel seems aggressive now with Optane, bundling and branding it with the new Coffee Lake chips.
CheapSushi - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
Plus still waiting on x4 PCIe laned M.2 Optanes.CheapSushi - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
Isn't it because those other drives have a lot more RAM and RAM still beats phase change? Optane is still better is many other regards but choices of course depend on more variables.tamalero - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
I dont get it, how they claim its competition when WD's performance is absolutely abysmal compared to the EVOs.tamalero - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Disregard my comment. Turns out I was checking the blue instead of the orange bars.What a monstrous difference in performance compared to the prior models!
Billy Tallis - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
We did warn Western Digital that they weren't doing enough to separate the branding of last year's model and this year's model. I expect a lot of confusion and disappointment over the next few months until the old models are no longer available for purchase.