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Western Digital WD Black 3D NAND SSD Review
- TheForumTroll 9y agoThe Intel use more power than two or three of the others combined in some tests. You gotta be pretty desperate for Intel fanboy-respect or having a very niche usage to buy one over a Samsung IMO.
- astrodust 9y agoOn a desktop computer the power consumption difference is utterly irrelevant. Who cares about a few extra watts when your GPU is guzzling a hundred?
- bhouston 9y agoThe difference between this drive and Optane isn't huge. It is faster on a lot of benchmarks, competitive on others, and only is behind on two latency tests.
- dogma1138 9y agoNone of these benchmarks really represent what Optane is useful at if you are buying it as an SSD storage you’ll be wasting money. https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Intel-Optane-SSD-900P-480GB-and-280GB-NVMe-HHHL-SSD-Review-Lots-3D-XPoint/Performa-2 https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Intel-Optane-SSD-900P-... The biggest bottleneck in the current form factor is the OS which is why the Optane can match a ram drive in latency. Once Optane DIMMs will hit the market or once a dedicated access protocol will be developed for low latency non volatile storage will be developed and the OS won’t be as much of a bottleneck it would be much more useful.
- georgeburdell 9y agoThat's a little disingenuous. Intel's 700 series SSD does not have anomalously high power. The Optane SSD, based on a completely different technology, has power consumption that is higher but is the top performer in many other metrics.
- wtallis 9y agoThe recent 700 series drive from Intel—the 760p—is pretty good in terms of power consumption. The older 750 was, like the Optane 900P, a large power-hungry card based on their enterprise SSDs and never intended to be used in mobile systems. Intel has on many occasions re-purposed their enterprise SSD tech to make a premium SSD for the consumer market, but that strategy has some downsides.
- coldtea 9y agoEven if Intel products are bad, using terms like "pretty desperate for Intel fanboy-respect" do not exactly signal a mature and impartial view of the market.
- agumonkey 9y agodepends, intel has very high quality stats, and sometimes deal make some drives cheap. If you want cheap and durable..
- jotm 9y agoHey, as long as they don't suddenly fail by becoming an 8MB SSD and forcing you to flash a new firmware and lose all your data :D Good times.
- astrodust 9y agoGood to see Western Digital will stay relevant. After years of buying their products I was concerned they'd fade into obscurity without a viable SSD product. Conner got absorbed by Seagage. Micropolis rebranded and went bankrupt. Maxtor got sponged up by Western Digital. Hard to bet on a horse that lasts.
- otakucode 9y agoI'm not intimately familiar with the various players in the storage market, but as an outsider I would guess that Western Digital must be doing alright. They could have, but didn't, break up the price-fixing ruling that market and taken it over handily if need be. Amazing that in 2018 it's still more expensive to get data storage on a dumb grid of NAND gates built out of common materials than it is to get it on hard drives infused with helium, sporting a high precision high speed motor, platters coated with rare materials, neodymium magnets, and, coming soon, lasers!
- southern_cross 9y agoSSDs are trouncing hard drives in capacity, though. AFAIK, they currently top out at 30TB in the 2.5in form factor and 100TB in the 3.5in form factor. (I'm not sure what the current top end is for other form factors but they're probably remarkably high, too.) Of course, prices for these units are also way up there.
- theologic 9y agoYup, it's hard to get rid of spinning rust unless you want to spend 10x the cost. While we don't have a good future in the sport car market (SSDs), we are truly the good guys are storing lots of stuff cheap on a cent/GB level. Basically we're semi-truck and our future is the cloud. An overview of the hard drive mission and tech we're working on presented at OCP by your's truly and my roadmap buddy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTngxWv64fI&t=624s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTngxWv64fI&t=624s
- jacquesm 9y ago> Amazing that in 2018 it's still more expensive to get data storage on a dumb grid of NAND gates built out of common materials than it is to get it on hard drives infused with helium, sporting a high precision high speed motor, platters coated with rare materials, neodymium magnets, and, coming soon, lasers! And the heads, those are incredibly tiny works of art.
- Everlag 9y agoFor those not following the consumer SSD market closely, this is a bit of an upset. Previously, Samsung was king and basically unchallenged on price/performance for mainstream and high performance loads. Now we've got Western Digital, previously seen as a spinning rust king with an SSD side business, coming in and making an extremely competitive offering. While they're not strictly better, they're the best the market has seen from outside Korea or Intel. If you want to quickly get the long-short of the review, check out the 'Destroyer' benchmark[0] and the price/gb chart[1]. Though I recommend reading the entire thing, anandtech reviews are a treat. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12543/the-western-digital-wd-black-3d-nand-ssd-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/12543/the-western-digital-wd-... [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12543/the-western-digital-wd-black-3d-nand-ssd-review/10 https://www.anandtech.com/show/12543/the-western-digital-wd-...
- lawrenceyan 9y agoIn comparison to general processing, I haven't been keeping up with advancement in SSD/flash memory technology very much. Is the market still the cut-throat low margin hell hole I remember it being, or has technological improvement slowed to a point where performance gain is now much more difficult to achieve?
- peller 9y agoIt's both, depending on the segment. The vast majority of SSD controllers can easily saturate the SATA bus, so there's not really much room for differentiation in 2.5"/M.2 SATA drives. But when you've got a PCIe-3 x4 bus to work with, as is the case for the NVMe drives being compared in this article, it's a whole different ball game. There the bottleneck is the controller (and to a much lesser extent, the flash itself). For a while Samsung was really the only game in town, as far as high-end performance goes, but it seems like WD has finally got a worthy competitor. Now it just remains to be seen how well the drives hold up (bad controller firmware can put up high performance numbers at the expense of the longevity of the flash (aka your data)).
- adventured 9y agoIt has stabilized into a modest margin business for the few big companies that dominate it. Very similar to how the HDD market did. Based on the margins Western Digital has been seeing lately, I'd say it's even more lucrative. Western Digital almost has 20% operating income margins at this point, that's a notch below where Intel is typically at (25%-30%) and comparable to Cisco. Their latest two quarters saw them generate $1.85 billion in operating income on $10.5 billion in sales. Not bad.
- porker 9y agoDurability will be the test. I've one data point, but I've had 6 SSDs, most from Crucial, used for developer-desktop work (VMs etc) and as well as regular file corruption via 'bad sectors' (didn't think those were standard on an SSD due to its error checking) they've failed more regularly than any hard drive ever did, even the ones thrown around in laptops. I am seriously considering paying double for an Intel SSD next time, as I understand they are less likely to fail.
- jmiserez 9y agoIs that a Crucial M4? I had mine replaced 3 times due to sector corruption as well, and then trashed it. It also had a bug where it would break after ~5200 hours of use. OTOH, I never had an issue with my Intel or Samsung SSDs, even with heavier use. I agree with you that reliability is key, and it bugs me that reviews still mostly look at speed and price.
- Terretta 9y agoThis review durability rating was 0.3 writes a day for 5 years. Hopefully they mean rewrite entire drive every 3 days.
- porker 9y agoMostly MX100's of varying sizes. The one that's currently doing sector corruption is a MX300 750GB, and the "Too good to be true" new price on Amazon (in a sale) should've been a warning.
- marcosscriven 9y agoReviews like this always give me an irrational desire to build a desktop machine again.
- dsr_ 9y agoThe rationality would depend on what you need, wouldn't it? If you have a nice, stable place to work, you can optimize for that. Big high-resolution monitors, nice sound system, great keyboard, several pointing devices to switch between: these go well with desktops. If you move around frequently, or don't have much space, that constrains your choices.
- mdpopescu 9y ago"Write endurance ratings are a reasonable 0.3-0.4 drive writes per day for five years." What? It's reasonable to have a drive where you write once every 3 days? I do backups more often than that.