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 - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The average data rate from the new WD Black on The Destroyer is almost as fast as Samsung's TLC-based 960 EVO and their newer PM981 OEM drive. Where the original WD Black NVMe SSD was clearly a low-end NVMe drive and no faster than SATA SSDs on this test, the new WD Black is competitive at the high end.
The average latencies from the WD Black are competitive with Samsung's TLC drives, and the 99th percentile latencies are the fastest we've seen from any flash-based SSD for this capacity class.
The average read latencies from the WD Black on The Destroyer are as good as any flash-based SSD we've tested. Average write latencies are great but Samsung's top drives are still clearly faster.
The WD Black has the best 99th percentile read latency scores aside from Intel's Optane SSD 900P, but the 99th percentile write latency scores are only in the second tier of drives.
The load power consumption of the new WD Black is a huge improvement over the previous SSD to bear this name. The new model uses less than half as much energy over the course of The Destroyer, putting it in first place slightly ahead of the Toshiba XG5.
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FreckledTrout - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
Since they like sticking to brands they have built like "Black" maybe these should be the new VelociRaptor series? When I here these I think black its 7,200 rpm and the Raptor is 10K rpm.tamalero - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
They should have renamed the new BLACKs as PLATINUM or TITANIUM. It works.lilmoe - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Ohhh?? Not bad! Still would've preferred if they had undercut Samsung on pricing a significant bit though.Samus - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
nCache 3.0's design has me concerned about write thrashing, which killed many Intel SSD's suffering from a bug causing write thrashing in just a few years. The Intel 2500's were chronically plagued with this bug because many OEM's (Lenovo...) never patched them and the drives burned themselves out doing tons of unnecessary house keeping.Hopefully nCache 3.0 has some failsafes.
imaheadcase - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
It really blows my mind how companies are TERRIBLE at naming products. Its almost like they don't even use common sense for it. Granted these are marketed towards people who most likely are building own systems and what not...but even i'm confused with Intel branding even.At least name product lines based on something that stands out to people to remember.
If i'm not mistaken, isn't Western Digital Black also a platter hardrive as well? Put that into the fact that the article says some of the old versions still be on market even if different sizes..i can easily see someone ordering wrong part.
I miss the days when a CPU was sold based on clock speed alone.
I guess it doesn't help that Aandtech site ventured away from consumer based stuff to more industry based news/reviews.
Drazick - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
I want this in U.2 or SATA Express format.KAlmquist - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
At this point I wouldn't be inclined to recommend this drive. The performance reported in this review is good, but:1) It appears that Western Digital is only providing review samples of the 1TB model. For the smaller sizes, the only information we have about performance is the manufacturer's claims.
2) The peculiar branding. Two names for the same drive, both of which are the same as the names of older drives. In particular, a recommendation of the Black drive is likely to result in the person getting an older, slower drive.
3) The drive was just released so it has no track record.
JWKauffman - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
I'm curious why WD apparently isn't supplying an NVMe driver to optimize their controller. I think the question should have been raised in the review.tamalero - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
Most third party companies do not offer any kind of driver. They rely on Windows's.I have a Corsair MP500, same issue.
JWKauffman - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
I understand that, but if I were WD and positioning these drives as Samsung competitors, I'd want to have a driver tailored to my controller the same as Samsung does.