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
Mr Perfect - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
On one hand I appreciate having a mechanical in the charts to see how these SSDs compare, since it's a great way to show the benefits of upgrading to one. On the other hand it makes the SSD results really hard to read, as they become disappearingly small. Hopefully one day we won't have to show people the difference.Billy Tallis - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
It's not something I plan to include in most reviews. I only added it for this one because the mechanical drive I happened to have on hand to benchmark was also a 1TB WD Black. On a lot of reviews, I leave out Optane drives for the same reasons.amar.znzi - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
> The new controller has a tri-core architecture (probably using Arm Cortex-R cores) fabricated in a 28nm process.Please don't speculate. Can you confirm with WD which Instruction Set Architecture is being used?
Billy Tallis - Sunday, April 8, 2018 - link
We asked repeatedly, and all we could get was that it isn't RISC-V. But every other NVMe controller used in consumer SSDs uses Cortex-R, and there's no reason to suspect WD is doing anything different. There aren't many alternatives. They designed this controller architecture to put as much of the important functionality on dedicated hardware as possible, so doing something unusual with the CPU cores doesn't present much opportunity for improving performance or efficiency.Klimax - Sunday, April 8, 2018 - link
Maybe ARC. (Intel uses it for some of their MEs)amar.znzi - Saturday, April 14, 2018 - link
Oh, it's not. WD has anounced that it intends to transition a large volume of it's products to RISC-V. Thanks, that answered my question.HStewart - Sunday, April 8, 2018 - link
One question, I have is there any real advantage of using this model version cheaper model - in an USB-C Gen 2 case?SanX - Sunday, April 8, 2018 - link
Which tasks will benefit from fast drives and which will not in real life ? Will Antivirus full clean go faster then 3-4 days currently? Or archieving? Or search for file with specific content? Having 10x read speed will loading Windows go 10x faster then with neanderthal mechanical Western Digital Gold hard drives or only by mere 10%? That what I like to see as tests not that semi-nonsence which resembles proverbial fake news of political media.Good would be to see the temperature map on a heavy load, the 10, 13 and even on some drives 20 Watts for such small formfactor is a lot.
Also I still keep for history some old hard drives which don't giveup their life after 30 years. Will these new ones with guaranteed 5 years then disintegrate after 10?
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - link
Most people don't keep their hard drives for 30 years, as the interface connector is far obsolete by now. I'm not even certain that IDE/PATA goes back that far, and you'd most likely need a highly specialized product to even read/write to that drive. 10 years for an SSD is a reasonable lifespan, as you'd probably upgrade to something faster or denser after that time.Rami Meir - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
I would like to see:1. 2TB 2280 and 4TB 22110
2. IOPS performance @ QD=1
P.S. SW Drivers available at www.nvmexpress.org
Warranty period directly calculated based on the Endurance fures