4 ms·

For 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 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 8y ago
In 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 8y ago
  It'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 8y ago
  It 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.
  - lawrenceyan 8y ago
    Is this monopolistic/cartel-like in nature, or is purely due to the costs of capital expenditures for research and development? Also, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle.
- theologic 8y ago
  The NAND industry went into a severe shortage (as NAND goes) along with DRAM. However, NAND shortage happened due to 2D to 3D. While 3D allows for high cell density, it also made Capex go from about 8B to around 25B as an industry. One of the reason Lam stock price has been on a tear. NAND spot pricing went up somewhere between 200-300% for like on like technology. Margins exploded, and the industry grew larger than any forecasts. There is a big debate on if the margins will stay high. While DRAM is still edging up, we may have seen some lowering of NAND pricing. So cost reduction is coming from mixing to MLC and TLC with better architectures in the same package.
  - lawrenceyan 8y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle
theologic 8y ago
As a side note, WD bought SanDisk. While they had bought STEC before this, SanDisk brought scale and much larger engineering force. WD had a great brand, and these two things may work together for them.
- mrmondo 8y ago
  Not to mention that Sandisk’s reliability and firmware was (is) a great measure better than Samsung’s - which has more than its share of problems and scandals.
pmorici 8y ago
Samsung supports AES-256 hardware encryption on pretty much all their drives I don't see that on these WD / Sandisk products that is kind of a deal breaker for me.
- spudlyo 8y ago
  Personally, I now prefer to do crypto using FOSS software, even if it means a CPU performance hit. Who knows which crypto library is being used with hardware? I had certainly never heard of Infineon's RSALib before CVE-2017-15361 caused me to have to revoke one of my RSA keys that was generated on a Yubikey.
  - pmorici 8y ago
    Why do you view that any differently than all the CVE's for FOSS crypto software?
    - spudlyo 8y ago
      Now I'm not one to go quoting ESR, but it's essentially because FOSS crypto software is widely used and has had a lot of eyeballs on it. Clearly that doesn't grant it immunity from bugs, but given my recent experiences, I'm a lot less trusting of hardware manufacturers to get crypto right.
      - pmorici 8y ago
        I'm familiar with the sentiment but there are numerous high profile CVE's in the past decade that persisted in FOSS for long periods despite wide use and many eyes. The only hardware one I'm aware of is the YubiKey.
        spudlyo 8y ago
        I think we agree that the many eyes maxim isn't as big of a factor as some might make it out to be, perhaps it's more of a "the devil you know" situation. With hardware there isn't a lot of transparency around the implementations that are used, so it just makes me feel uncertain. I'd rather throw my lot in with OpenSSL and GPG than unknown library X. Also, it wasn't just Yubico products that were impacted by the vulnerability. It was estimated that 25% of all TPM devices globally were impacted, which adds up to millions of smartcards.

lawrenceyan 8y ago

In 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 8y ago
It'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 8y ago
It 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.
- lawrenceyan 8y ago
  Is this monopolistic/cartel-like in nature, or is purely due to the costs of capital expenditures for research and development? Also, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle.
theologic 8y ago
The NAND industry went into a severe shortage (as NAND goes) along with DRAM. However, NAND shortage happened due to 2D to 3D. While 3D allows for high cell density, it also made Capex go from about 8B to around 25B as an industry. One of the reason Lam stock price has been on a tear. NAND spot pricing went up somewhere between 200-300% for like on like technology. Margins exploded, and the industry grew larger than any forecasts. There is a big debate on if the margins will stay high. While DRAM is still edging up, we may have seen some lowering of NAND pricing. So cost reduction is coming from mixing to MLC and TLC with better architectures in the same package.
- lawrenceyan 8y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle

theologic 8y ago

As a side note, WD bought SanDisk. While they had bought STEC before this, SanDisk brought scale and much larger engineering force. WD had a great brand, and these two things may work together for them.

mrmondo 8y ago
Not to mention that Sandisk’s reliability and firmware was (is) a great measure better than Samsung’s - which has more than its share of problems and scandals.

pmorici 8y ago

Samsung supports AES-256 hardware encryption on pretty much all their drives I don't see that on these WD / Sandisk products that is kind of a deal breaker for me.

spudlyo 8y ago
Personally, I now prefer to do crypto using FOSS software, even if it means a CPU performance hit. Who knows which crypto library is being used with hardware? I had certainly never heard of Infineon's RSALib before CVE-2017-15361 caused me to have to revoke one of my RSA keys that was generated on a Yubikey.
- pmorici 8y ago
  Why do you view that any differently than all the CVE's for FOSS crypto software?
  - spudlyo 8y ago
    Now I'm not one to go quoting ESR, but it's essentially because FOSS crypto software is widely used and has had a lot of eyeballs on it. Clearly that doesn't grant it immunity from bugs, but given my recent experiences, I'm a lot less trusting of hardware manufacturers to get crypto right.
    - pmorici 8y ago
      I'm familiar with the sentiment but there are numerous high profile CVE's in the past decade that persisted in FOSS for long periods despite wide use and many eyes. The only hardware one I'm aware of is the YubiKey.
      - spudlyo 8y ago
        I think we agree that the many eyes maxim isn't as big of a factor as some might make it out to be, perhaps it's more of a "the devil you know" situation. With hardware there isn't a lot of transparency around the implementations that are used, so it just makes me feel uncertain. I'd rather throw my lot in with OpenSSL and GPG than unknown library X. Also, it wasn't just Yubico products that were impacted by the vulnerability. It was estimated that 25% of all TPM devices globally were impacted, which adds up to millions of smartcards.