Yes it nice to have competition in this area and important thing to notice here a long time disk drive manufacture is changes it technology to meet changes in storage technology.
Looks like WD's purchase of SanDisk is showing some payoff. If only Toshiba would have taken advantage of OCZ (who purchased Indilinx) in-house talent. The Barefoot controller showed a lot of promise and could have easily been updated to support low power states and TLC NAND. But they shelved it. I don't really know why Toshiba bought OCZ.
Indeed! Samsung did have too long time performance supremesy and that did make the company to upp the prices (natural development thought). Hopefully this better situation help uss customers in reasonable time frame. Too much bad news to consumers last years considering the prices.
The steady state QD32 random write test doesn't say anything meaningful about how modern SSDs will behave on real client workloads. It used to be a half-decent test before everything was TLC with SLC caching and the potential for thermal throttling on M.2 NVMe drives. Now, it's impossible to run a sustained workload for an hour and claim that it tells you something about how your drive will handle a bursty real world workload. The only purpose that benchmark can serve today is to tell you how suitable a consumer drive is for (ab)use as an enterprise drive.
Most of the tests don't say anything meaningful about "how modern SSDs will behave on real client workloads". You can spend 400% more money on storage that will only get you 4% of performance improvement in real world tasks.
So why not omit synthetic tests altogether while you are at it?
You're alluding to the difference between storage performance and whole system/application performance. A storage benchmark doesn't necessarily give you a direct measurement of whole system or application performance, but done properly it will tell you about how the choice of an SSD will affect the portion of your workload that is storage-dependent. Much like Amdahl's law, speeding up storage doesn't affect the non-storage bottlenecks in your workload.
That's not the problem with the steady-state random write test. The problem with the steady state random write test is that real world usage doesn't put the drive in steady state, and the steady state behavior is completely different from the behavior when writing in bursts to the SLC cache. So that benchmark isn't even applicable to the 5% or 1% of your desktop usage that is spent waiting on storage.
On the other hand, I have tried to ensure that the synthetic benchmarks I include actually are representative of real-world client storage workloads, by focusing primarily on low queue depths and limiting the benchmark duration to realistic quantities of data transferred and giving the drive idle time instead of running everything back to back. Synthetic benchmarks don't have to be the misleading marketing tests designed to produce the biggest numbers possible.
People do want to see how much time it takes before cache gives out. Don't presume to know what all people do with their systems.
As I mentioned 99% of the tests are already useless when it comes to indicating overall system performance. 99% of the people don't need anything above mainstream SATA SSD. So your point on excluding that one test is rather moot.
All in all, it seems you are intentionally hiding the weakness of certain products. Not cool. Run the tests, post the numbers, that's what you get paid for, I don't think it is unreasonable to expect that you do your job. Two people pointed out the absence of that tests, which is two more than those who explicitly stated they don't care about it, much less have anything against it. Statistically speaking, the test is of interest, and I highly doubt it will kill you to include it.
You're going a bit overboard here with the paranoia.
The ATSB Heavy and Light tests are designed to represent performance under normal use by power-wistful and typical consumers, respectively. So if you actually care about real-world performance, those results are enough. (And arguably, even the (ab)use as an Enterprise drive scenario, is largely addressed by the ATSB Destroyer test.)
Agree boeush, ihe QD32 that was omitted really just makes some drives look like they are higher performing but in 99+% use cases that is misleading since its very hard to hit a queue depth of 32 in desktop usage.
Such arrogant attitude! Did you pay Anandtech's staff well enough to make such demand? If you don't find what you seek here, feel free to go elsewhere.
It would be useful for me for an article which steps back and looks at various storage technologies (new and old) and measure their impact on consumer usages.
For example, how much would I gain from upgrading my ancient 840 EVO to a new NVME drive or even Optane.
99th percentile results are performance consistency testing. Although, that's typically only important in DC devices which are typically not made in m.2 form factors.
This is why the 250GB 960 EVO (and inevitably for the new WD Black as well) is far and away the most popular SKU just about everywhere. At around $110-120 vs $80-90, you're only paying a premium of around 20-25% over an equivalent tiered SATA III drive (ala an 850/860 EVO), though yes, you are sacrificing your sequential write speeds past the 13GB Turbowrite cache to just 300MB/s to get that comparatively tiny price premium for good NVMe vs SATA-III ratio.
Tbh though in most general consumer PC workloads the above simply isn't an issue, as sustained writes of >13GB are few & far between, and the cache turnover speed while idling is speedy quick. I think this is exactly the reason why Western Digital & SanDisk adopted the kind of handicapped nCache 2.0 into a very Turbowrite-esque system with nCache 3.0 (but more like 850 EVO's simplier static TW cache just a lot bigger, rather a dynamic one like the 960 EVO uses).
competition is good, but not if they all want to keep pricing within a few $ of each other IMO.
for nvme/M.2 drives they need to make sure is more universal that it is more plug and play so consumers can be assured it will work on their motherboard as a bootable OS drive right off the bat without driver specific support (quite a few drives quite a few no matter on Intel or AMD chipset seem to have this issue hence they need more plug and play support)
costs more than a normal sata based one (performance is much higher though that does not always mean can see this difference) but having to screw around making the bios/windows able to use the drive in question sucks (not saying this is a problem with this specific model, but it is a problem)
I agree with you on pricing. It would be good if WD had priced their drive a bit lower in order to force Samsung to respond since they have a competitive product, but they have to get a return on development costs so it's safe for them to match Samsung's price. I don't like it because the consumer isn't realizing a benefit in additional competition if neither company budges on cost, but I can understand the business justifications that are probably behind it.
What I do wish is that the m2 sata drives should be the same price as sata ssd. After all, the specs are the same just diff forms. Too bad for us consumers.
M.2 SATA drives should cost *less* than their 2.5" equivalents, and the 2.5" drives should simply be an M.2 drives in an enclosure with an M.2-to-SATA connector.
It should but it doesn't. My guess is because m2 form is a niche market because most computer accept SATA. Therefore, companies can charge more because they can get away with it. Unless there's a huge swing of adoption of m2 form for desktop and laptops, m2 will always cost more than SATA.
A new SSD controller that doesn't perform like shit is excellent news for a market that's seen Samsung ruling the roost for far too long. Hopefully this will be the beginning of price drops for NVMe drives that don't suck, and the beginning of the end of NVMe drives that are just SATA devices in an M.2 form factor.
It's interesting how Optane is not so much better in Destroyer/Heavy/Light tests. I expected it to lead in most of them, but found Samsung and WD's drives to match or beat it. With the recent hype around X-Point I was hoping for it to be a considerable improvement over NAND. It seems Intel doesn't deliver. Not for the average user at least.
Controller and lack of parallelism. The memory chip is insane. Intel needs to improve their volumes so that they can produce higher capacity drives, giving more capacity and performance at the same costs today. This is probably the reason why Intel seems aggressive now with Optane, bundling and branding it with the new Coffee Lake chips.
Isn't it because those other drives have a lot more RAM and RAM still beats phase change? Optane is still better is many other regards but choices of course depend on more variables.
We did warn Western Digital that they weren't doing enough to separate the branding of last year's model and this year's model. I expect a lot of confusion and disappointment over the next few months until the old models are no longer available for purchase.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
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
Higher capacities can be made available at 2280 by using a double sided drive. As for IOPS performance, that can be calculated fairly easily, and I *think* Anandtech does that (I haven't read this review recently). I'm not sure what you mean about the drivers, or "Warranty period directly calculated based on the Endurance fures"
I would really love it if Anandtech had some common usage scenario load times for things like a large spreadsheet in Excel or how fast some modern games load. I would also be interested to know about things like Windows load time and time to wake up from sleep or hibernation. From what I have seen, all of these super fast nvme ssds don't really have a lot of impact on typical end-user usage scenarios like for office workers or gamers. I love bleeding edge tech and I always want manufacturers to push the limits of price and performance but it seems to me like a lot of people get wrapped around the axles about SSD performance when something like an 850 Evo and a 960 Pro will have almost identical load times in a game.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
69 Comments
Back to Article
Chaitanya - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Nice to see some good competition to Samsung products in SSD space. Would like to see durability testing on these drives.HStewart - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Yes it nice to have competition in this area and important thing to notice here a long time disk drive manufacture is changes it technology to meet changes in storage technology.Samus - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Looks like WD's purchase of SanDisk is showing some payoff. If only Toshiba would have taken advantage of OCZ (who purchased Indilinx) in-house talent. The Barefoot controller showed a lot of promise and could have easily been updated to support low power states and TLC NAND. But they shelved it. I don't really know why Toshiba bought OCZ.haukionkannel - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
Indeed! Samsung did have too long time performance supremesy and that did make the company to upp the prices (natural development thought).Hopefully this better situation help uss customers in reasonable time frame. Too much bad news to consumers last years considering the prices.
XabanakFanatik - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Whatever happened to performance consistency testing?Billy Tallis - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
The steady state QD32 random write test doesn't say anything meaningful about how modern SSDs will behave on real client workloads. It used to be a half-decent test before everything was TLC with SLC caching and the potential for thermal throttling on M.2 NVMe drives. Now, it's impossible to run a sustained workload for an hour and claim that it tells you something about how your drive will handle a bursty real world workload. The only purpose that benchmark can serve today is to tell you how suitable a consumer drive is for (ab)use as an enterprise drive.iter - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Most of the tests don't say anything meaningful about "how modern SSDs will behave on real client workloads". You can spend 400% more money on storage that will only get you 4% of performance improvement in real world tasks.So why not omit synthetic tests altogether while you are at it?
Billy Tallis - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
You're alluding to the difference between storage performance and whole system/application performance. A storage benchmark doesn't necessarily give you a direct measurement of whole system or application performance, but done properly it will tell you about how the choice of an SSD will affect the portion of your workload that is storage-dependent. Much like Amdahl's law, speeding up storage doesn't affect the non-storage bottlenecks in your workload.That's not the problem with the steady-state random write test. The problem with the steady state random write test is that real world usage doesn't put the drive in steady state, and the steady state behavior is completely different from the behavior when writing in bursts to the SLC cache. So that benchmark isn't even applicable to the 5% or 1% of your desktop usage that is spent waiting on storage.
On the other hand, I have tried to ensure that the synthetic benchmarks I include actually are representative of real-world client storage workloads, by focusing primarily on low queue depths and limiting the benchmark duration to realistic quantities of data transferred and giving the drive idle time instead of running everything back to back. Synthetic benchmarks don't have to be the misleading marketing tests designed to produce the biggest numbers possible.
MrSpadge - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Good answer, Billy. It won't please everyone here, but that's impossible anyway.iter - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
People do want to see how much time it takes before cache gives out. Don't presume to know what all people do with their systems.As I mentioned 99% of the tests are already useless when it comes to indicating overall system performance. 99% of the people don't need anything above mainstream SATA SSD. So your point on excluding that one test is rather moot.
All in all, it seems you are intentionally hiding the weakness of certain products. Not cool. Run the tests, post the numbers, that's what you get paid for, I don't think it is unreasonable to expect that you do your job. Two people pointed out the absence of that tests, which is two more than those who explicitly stated they don't care about it, much less have anything against it. Statistically speaking, the test is of interest, and I highly doubt it will kill you to include it.
boeush - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
You're going a bit overboard here with the paranoia.The ATSB Heavy and Light tests are designed to represent performance under normal use by power-wistful and typical consumers, respectively. So if you actually care about real-world performance, those results are enough. (And arguably, even the (ab)use as an Enterprise drive scenario, is largely addressed by the ATSB Destroyer test.)
FreckledTrout - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Agree boeush, ihe QD32 that was omitted really just makes some drives look like they are higher performing but in 99+% use cases that is misleading since its very hard to hit a queue depth of 32 in desktop usage.MrSpadge - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
+1 @ boeush (just posting for your statistics, iter)Reflex - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Nobody on this site works for you, you don't get to define their job.DanD85 - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Such arrogant attitude! Did you pay Anandtech's staff well enough to make such demand? If you don't find what you seek here, feel free to go elsewhere.Manch - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
I don't care about the test. There. Along with the rest telling you to STFU your request statistically speaking is of little interest.Don't let the back button hit you on the way out, you ass.
Spunjji - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
You're not his boss. Go home.FwFred - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
It would be useful for me for an article which steps back and looks at various storage technologies (new and old) and measure their impact on consumer usages.For example, how much would I gain from upgrading my ancient 840 EVO to a new NVME drive or even Optane.
msabercr - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
99th percentile results are performance consistency testing.Although, that's typically only important in DC devices which are typically not made in m.2 form factors.
jjj - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Good that perf is ok, especially after last year's model but the price is no fun. do we still need an 80% premium over mainstream SATA?Cooe - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
This is why the 250GB 960 EVO (and inevitably for the new WD Black as well) is far and away the most popular SKU just about everywhere. At around $110-120 vs $80-90, you're only paying a premium of around 20-25% over an equivalent tiered SATA III drive (ala an 850/860 EVO), though yes, you are sacrificing your sequential write speeds past the 13GB Turbowrite cache to just 300MB/s to get that comparatively tiny price premium for good NVMe vs SATA-III ratio.Tbh though in most general consumer PC workloads the above simply isn't an issue, as sustained writes of >13GB are few & far between, and the cache turnover speed while idling is speedy quick. I think this is exactly the reason why Western Digital & SanDisk adopted the kind of handicapped nCache 2.0 into a very Turbowrite-esque system with nCache 3.0 (but more like 850 EVO's simplier static TW cache just a lot bigger, rather a dynamic one like the 960 EVO uses).
Dragonstongue - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
competition is good, but not if they all want to keep pricing within a few $ of each other IMO.for nvme/M.2 drives they need to make sure is more universal that it is more plug and play so consumers can be assured it will work on their motherboard as a bootable OS drive right off the bat without driver specific support (quite a few drives quite a few no matter on Intel or AMD chipset seem to have this issue hence they need more plug and play support)
costs more than a normal sata based one (performance is much higher though that does not always mean can see this difference) but having to screw around making the bios/windows able to use the drive in question sucks (not saying this is a problem with this specific model, but it is a problem)
nice write up though ^.^
PeachNCream - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
I agree with you on pricing. It would be good if WD had priced their drive a bit lower in order to force Samsung to respond since they have a competitive product, but they have to get a return on development costs so it's safe for them to match Samsung's price. I don't like it because the consumer isn't realizing a benefit in additional competition if neither company budges on cost, but I can understand the business justifications that are probably behind it.Cliff34 - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
What I do wish is that the m2 sata drives should be the same price as sata ssd. After all, the specs are the same just diff forms. Too bad for us consumers.The_Assimilator - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
M.2 SATA drives should cost *less* than their 2.5" equivalents, and the 2.5" drives should simply be an M.2 drives in an enclosure with an M.2-to-SATA connector.Cliff34 - Saturday, April 7, 2018 - link
It should but it doesn't. My guess is because m2 form is a niche market because most computer accept SATA. Therefore, companies can charge more because they can get away with it. Unless there's a huge swing of adoption of m2 form for desktop and laptops, m2 will always cost more than SATA.zodiacfml - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
True.wr3zzz - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
WD's pricing strategy is probably indicative that current demand for NVMe is still outpacing supply.Arbie - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Great article and follow-up analysis of the tests; thanks.iwod - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
What are the difference in real world usage? We thought we needed better QD1, and even that doesn't return any significant difference in optane.boeush - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
See the respective Destroyer, Heavy, and Light ATSB results - and match up your version of "real world" to the respective test scenario...The_Assimilator - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
A new SSD controller that doesn't perform like shit is excellent news for a market that's seen Samsung ruling the roost for far too long. Hopefully this will be the beginning of price drops for NVMe drives that don't suck, and the beginning of the end of NVMe drives that are just SATA devices in an M.2 form factor.darckhart - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
any TCG OPAL encryption in WD or Sandisk?tommo1982 - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
It's interesting how Optane is not so much better in Destroyer/Heavy/Light tests. I expected it to lead in most of them, but found Samsung and WD's drives to match or beat it. With the recent hype around X-Point I was hoping for it to be a considerable improvement over NAND. It seems Intel doesn't deliver. Not for the average user at least.zodiacfml - Friday, April 6, 2018 - link
Controller and lack of parallelism. The memory chip is insane. Intel needs to improve their volumes so that they can produce higher capacity drives, giving more capacity and performance at the same costs today.This is probably the reason why Intel seems aggressive now with Optane, bundling and branding it with the new Coffee Lake chips.
CheapSushi - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
Plus still waiting on x4 PCIe laned M.2 Optanes.CheapSushi - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
Isn't it because those other drives have a lot more RAM and RAM still beats phase change? Optane is still better is many other regards but choices of course depend on more variables.tamalero - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
I dont get it, how they claim its competition when WD's performance is absolutely abysmal compared to the EVOs.tamalero - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
Disregard my comment. Turns out I was checking the blue instead of the orange bars.What a monstrous difference in performance compared to the prior models!
Billy Tallis - Thursday, April 5, 2018 - link
We did warn Western Digital that they weren't doing enough to separate the branding of last year's model and this year's model. I expect a lot of confusion and disappointment over the next few months until the old models are no longer available for purchase.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.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
MajGenRelativity - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
Higher capacities can be made available at 2280 by using a double sided drive. As for IOPS performance, that can be calculated fairly easily, and I *think* Anandtech does that (I haven't read this review recently). I'm not sure what you mean about the drivers, or "Warranty period directly calculated based on the Endurance fures"oRAirwolf - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
I would really love it if Anandtech had some common usage scenario load times for things like a large spreadsheet in Excel or how fast some modern games load. I would also be interested to know about things like Windows load time and time to wake up from sleep or hibernation. From what I have seen, all of these super fast nvme ssds don't really have a lot of impact on typical end-user usage scenarios like for office workers or gamers. I love bleeding edge tech and I always want manufacturers to push the limits of price and performance but it seems to me like a lot of people get wrapped around the axles about SSD performance when something like an 850 Evo and a 960 Pro will have almost identical load times in a game.