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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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.