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 - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The WD Black's average data rates on the Light test are slightly slower than the Samsung 960 EVO when the test is run on an empty drive, and a bit faster when the drive is full. The Samsung PM981 is the only drive that has a clear lead in both cases, and even then it isn't a very big margin. The worst-case performance here from the new WD Black is substantially faster than the best-case from last year's WD Black.
The average latencies from the WD Black during the Light test are as low as any SSD offers. The 99th percentile latencies are not quite as fast as Samsung's best drives offer, except that the full-drive performance is better than the 960 EVO.
There are quite a few SSDs with average read latency scores that are close to or slightly better than the WD Black, and even the low-end NVMe SSDs keep the average read latency down to a fraction of a millisecond on the Light test. The average write latencies from the WD Black are essentially tied for first place with Samsung's drives.
The WD Black offers great 99th percentile write latency on the Light test as its SLC cache never fills. The 99th percentile read latency doesn't rank quite as high, but the full-drive score is very good.
As with the Heavy test, the only NVMe SSD we've tested that can match the WD Black's power efficiency is the Toshiba XG5. These drives get the job done much faster than a SATA drive without using any more energy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
69 Comments
View All Comments
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.