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.
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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.