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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Foeketijn - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
We are talking about a Watt. Difference or so. Adding an extra fan has more impact. (Laptop? Who is upgrading a laptop with an 2,5" disk? Those are only found in really cheap devices anyway) The evo is known to just keep on going way way over that endurance point. How will these fare? We don't know yet. I think he has a fair point. There is no logical reason to choose this over a samsung other than not liking samsung. And samsung is just sitting there waiting till people notice their m2 driver are creaping to their sata prices. For a couple dollar more you get benchmarks that don't fit in these diagrams. I'm not a samsung fan. Just sad that no one is even trying to win this fight. The 850 evo is almost 3 years old and still on top for it's pricepoint (250Gb it is)mapesdhs - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
Indeed, so until I see tech akin to the 850 EVO come back down to the 55 UKP level for 250GB where it was at a couple of years ago, I just keep hunting for new or lighly used 840 Pro or other models via normal auction, bagged another 840 Pro 256GB recently for 51 UKP; would be fascinating to see how this model and others from previous generations of good SSDs would fare in these tests (Vertex4, Neutron GTX, Extreme Pro, Vector, etc.) Except for power consumption (who cares in a desktop), I doubt the latest models are that much better at all. I miss the days of buying an 850 EVO 500GB for 118 UKP (that was Oct/2015).Until then, there's better value in NVMe models with addin card adapters, eg. SM951.
Luckz - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
When talking pound prices, it might be reasonable to mention how much your currency has changed since the 840 came out.Rictorhell - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
Hoping for someone, other than Samsung, to come up with a viable and somewhat affordable 4tb ssd, sata, or otherwise, so that prices at or near that capacity will become at least somewhat reasonable, someday, for those of us that need/want that capacity in an ssd.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
That would be nice, but for now, you could just buy two SSDs and RAID them together?mapesdhs - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
That's one heck of a reliability risk.MajGenRelativity - Friday, September 15, 2017 - link
Depending on the RAID type, your reliability risk would be the same, or better. Could be worse, but that would be if you were doing a striped volume, which only increases performance, and I don't think OP was looking for thatCheapSushi - Sunday, September 17, 2017 - link
Yeah, so is having 1 PSU, no redundant power from difference sources, so is not having ECC RAM usually because anyone that does something with their computer is looking for six nines in uptime because they're obviously a datacenter...TheinsanegamerN - Sunday, September 17, 2017 - link
So is keeping 4TB of data on a single drive that can fail without warning.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
Nice drives for a reasonable price and finally Samsung is starting to see a few competitive products but I don't think the focus is on SATA SSDs at this point. They're commonplace, but because the drive interface is limiting performance, we're unlikely to see any further high performance storage products for SATA which may explain why Samsung's not fighting very hard to keep a top tier drive there. They need mainstream and/or cost-effective storage which are essentially what SanDisk/WD, Crucial, and every other company that sells SATA SSDs ships out now. There's nothing wrong with that situation. I'm still on SATA and perfectly happy with the product selection out there now, but there's not much envelope left to push without shifting to interfaces like NVMe.