One Design, Two Products: The SanDisk Ultra 3D (1TB) and WD Blue 3D (1TB) SSD Reviews, with BiCS 3D NAND
by Billy Tallis on September 14, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech 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.
Orange is for the new drives, Blue is for the previous generation models
The new Western Digital 3D NAND SSDs don't show any improvement in average data rate on the Light test when the test is run on an empty drive, but performance when the drive is full is slightly better.
The average and 99th percentile latencies generally show no meaningful change for the new 3D NAND SSDs over their planar TLC predecessors; both new and old generations fall within the normal range of variation for most of their competitors. The full-drive latency scores for the new Western Digital 3D NAND SSDs are slightly improved and the difference between full and empty drive performance is relatively small.
Splitting the average latency by reads and writes doesn't reveal anything interesting about the WD and SanDisk drives, though it does show that the drives with poor full-drive performance differ in how they are affected: the Crucial MX300 has significantly higher read and write latency, while the OCZ VX500 is mostly affected on the write side and the OCZ Trion 150 is mostly affected on the read side.
There's a small but clear improvement to 99th percentile read latency for the new WD/SanDisk drives, while the 99th percentile write latencies are quite similar for almost all of the drives in this bunch.
The energy usage differences between most of these SSDs are insignificant; only the Crucial MX300 stands out with clearly lower power consumption than the WD/SanDisk drives. The Samsung and Phison-based drives use more energy than most.
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MrSpadge - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
The production cost is pretty much the same, be it SATA or PCIe. So "SATA being tapped" doesn't help price at all, except for the fact that manufacturers can't bill you for extra performance. But that was always the case with the slower SSDs.nathanddrews - Friday, September 15, 2017 - link
I know it's not realistic, hence "it would just be nice if".CheapSushi - Sunday, September 17, 2017 - link
V-NAND QLC will make that happen. I think for bulk storage, QLC SATA drives will be perfect for that duty and will decrease price per GB.Magichands8 - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
Unfortunately, it's still about 3 times more expensive than it should be for it to be viable. Still wouldn't buy either as they're both crippled by the SATA interface but hey, at least they got the form factor right by offering them in 2.5".MajGenRelativity - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
I'm not aware of any SSDs that are 1/3 the price, and there certainly aren't any that are 1/3 the price and have competitive performance. The SATA interface will not be going away for a while, and most people don't need the performance afforded by PCIeDanNeely - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
I assume he's sulking because it's still about 5-6x as expensive as spinning rust. ($50 for the 1TB blue at 5400 RPM on amazon). I haven't seen any more recent projections but as of a a year ago the crossover in price per TB was predicted to occur in the mid 2020's; so we've still got a way to go.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
Fair point, but SSDs are still viable without a price drop, mass-market adoption is what requires the price dropMagichands8 - Friday, September 15, 2017 - link
Oh I don't mind paying a premium for the SSD tech but I do mind the ridiculously inflated prices and performance bottlenecks that we've had to put up with for years and years. From the other posts here it's obvious that there are a lot of people comfortable with that though and willing if not eager to pay very high prices for low capacity and low performance drives even while manufacturers have had years to differentiate their products. Even when said people must know of the supply shortages and the impending lower prices only a matter of months away. Like I've said before, drives like these might be real last ditch options for people in a crunch who absolutely need a replacement drive immediately or perhaps some other niche reason. But otherwise it just doesn't make much sense.CheapSushi - Sunday, September 17, 2017 - link
Are you saying this because you want to have ONE drive in your system to function as a performance panacea? I can see why someone would advocate for that particular setup if JUST a gamer with a mini-ITX system. But with ATX systems, there's nothing wrong with multiple drives; fom NVMe Optane, to NVMe PCIe to AHCI SATA, each have a place.Magichands8 - Sunday, September 17, 2017 - link
EVERYONE should advocate for that setup. You're obviously very accustomed to think it natural for someone to have 3 or 4 different kinds of storage to achieve their goal(s). Are you telling me that if I offered you a single drive and interface that satisfied all of those rolls you would reject it? Are you actually advocating that computer users should be FORCED to compromise at every step of the way when they use their system?