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  • Chaitanya - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link

    Just read the review at Hardwarecanucks, looks like a decent SSD.
  • smorebuds - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link

    I assume you're saying you just read the Hardwarecanucks review, but this could also read like you're telling people to check out Hardwarecanucks instead. Lol.
  • ikjadoon - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link

    Dem irregular plurals.
  • Gigaplex - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    Read (red) vs read (reed) are not plurals.
  • masouth - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link

    I'm guessing that they may have meant irregular verbs.
  • chrysrobyn - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link

    I always thought WD's Green line traded performance for capacity and that tradeoff happened to be cheaper. We see the IOPS numbers reflecting that decreased performance, but I really wish the capacity was on par. Perhaps this is indicative of SSDs being dominated by a NAND cost that's the same between the two lines. I think there's a market for people who want bigger and bigger SSDs but are willing to trade a lot of performance (but not necessarily reliability) -- if that were possible.
  • goatfajitas - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link

    WD Green HDD's were always geared for low power and noise, not necessarily any specific storage level. Agreed, higher storage tiers would be good.
  • Valantar - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link

    Cost-wise, we're not there yet. I doubt that will happen until 3D QLC drives start appearing. (Although these (probably) won't be suitable as system drives due to very limited flash endurance.) Flash is a very, very large portion of the price of an SSD - and larges as capacities grow. While the price delta between a high-end and low-end 120GB SSD might be huge (less than $40 for the cheapest 120GB SATA SSD at newegg, vs. $107 for an 850 Pro, a 167% price increase), that difference diminishes very rapidly (at 256GB, the delta is $60 to $122, or just 103% more). Also, as price competition grows and margins shrink, the only way for SSD makers to profit from drives like these would be volume, and sales of $200+ SSDs are just not large enough for this.

    Given the inherent links between flash production processes, die capacity, parallelism, and write endurance, you're not going to see high-reliability, low-cost, high-capacity SSDs any time soon. After all, high capacity requires either dense dies (high cost), many packages (high cost), die stacking (high cost) or a mixture of the above. And two out of these three lead to high performance to boot, as long as the controller allows it. High-capacity, low-performance, low-cost, low-reliability? Sure (-ish. they won't be _cheap_ at first), with QLC. Low-capacity, low-cost, low-performance? I'd say we're there already, with decent endurance. But your requested combination is really hard to get to with NAND.
  • Gigaplex - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    "I think there's a market for people who want bigger and bigger SSDs but are willing to trade a lot of performance (but not necessarily reliability) -- if that were possible."

    The market for drives that sacrifice a lot of performance for larger capacity is already covered by HDDs.
  • BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link

    Western Digital may run into some problems when customer expectations conflict with product specifications and performance with their Green series SSDs. They've spent a few years positioning and marketing the Green branding against a certain set of criteria. Now, customers are trained to expect those traits and will likely be tripped up a bit by the different market position of the Green SSDs. It probably would have been better to find a means of categorizing drives that didn't already have a set of perceptions tied to it.
  • MrSpadge - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link

    People expect the green to be the slowest HDD and silent - check. Capacity is a different matter: there are / have also been 500 GB and 1 TB Greens.
  • mikato - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link

    "While the Green label has connotations of better than average power efficiency when applied to WD's hard drives, the low performance of DRAM-less SSDs usually leads to poor energy efficiency during active use and the idle power savings tend to be minimal."

    This seems strange to me. Minimal idle power savings over hard drives? I guess they don't use a whole lot to begin with, single digit watts, but how much are we talking about here?
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link

    I meant that the DRAMless SSDs tend to not have significantly better idle power consumption than SSDs with DRAM caches. Either way, their idle power tends to be just a few tens of mW when they're put in to power saving mode. The WD Green SSD is not likely to offer better laptop battery life than the WD Blue SSD.

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