The Western Digital WD Black SN750 SSD Review: Why Fix What Isn't Broken?
by Billy Tallis on January 18, 2019 8:01 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The WD Black SN750 improves slightly over its predecessor on The Destroyer, setting a new record for the highest average data rate from a TLC-based SSD.
The SN750 has slightly lower average latency on The Destroyer than its predecessor, but the Phison E12-based Corsair MP510 is in the lead among flash-based SSDs. The MP510 and both the current and previous WD Black are essentially tied for 99th percentile latency.
The SN750 improves on both average read and write latency scores, but the Corsair MP510 has a much better average write latency on The Destroyer than the WD Black or even the Intel Optane 900P.
The 99th percentile read and write latency scores for the SN750 are essentially unchanged from the previous WD Black, leaving it with one of the best QoS scores for reads but a score for writes that is worse than several of last year's TLC-based competitors.
The total energy consumption of the new WD Black over the course of The Destroyer is about 4% lower than its predecessor, further increasing WD's lead in NVMe power efficiency.
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iwod - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Patiently waiting for PCI-E 5.0 SSD, that is 16GB/s for 4x.Ryan Smith - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
So for what it's worth, the last time I talked to the PCI-SIG about PCIe 5, they were saying that they were expecting it to be used in conjunction with PCIe 4 rather than replacing it. The idea being that the PCIe x16 slot closest to the CPU would be a PCIe 5 slot, while everything else would be PCIe 4 due to the distances and signal integrity issues involved.If that's still the plan, then I wouldn't expect to see PCIe 5 SSDs, at least not in the M.2 form factor.
iwod - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
Thx. But surely Directly Attached NAND from SSD is more important? It is way more latency sensitive than GPU.I am wondering if we could get sort of like 20x Slot with 16x bandwidth. So 4x for SSD, and 8x * 2 for GPU.Most people are still using a single graphics card, I would be fine with 8x GPU PCI-E 5.0 and 4x for SSD.
Does that mean we might never see Thunderbolt 5 with PCI-E 5 signalling?
GreenReaper - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
Basically this is how PCIe 4 is likely to work for many existing AMD motherboards.ScouserPcgamer - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
The Seagate Firecuda wipes the floor of read/write speeds, this is like a 1% improvement over the 2018 modelLogitechFan - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
And then comes 970 Pro and wipes the floor with all of them and spits on their graves.LogitechFan - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
970 Pro is not on the list?! WTF is this, an Intel commercial?!Oxford Guy - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
What is and isn't tested is sometimes very strange here. The Nvidia GTX 960, for example, was never tested."Editor's Note: Due to personal matters we won’t have a GeForce GTX 960 review published today. But in lieu of that we wanted to go over the basics of NVIDIA’s latest Maxwell card"
Today or ever.
"Anyhow, that’s a wrap from us for now. Be sure to check back in early next week for our complete look at GeForce GTX 960, including performance, overclocking, HEVC support, and more."
Still waiting... Those promises were posted in 2015.
Oxford Guy - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
"Conspiracy theorists" claimed the card wasn't tested because it was a turkey, making Nvidia look bad.Has Anandtech staff ever explained why the promised review never materialized?
Ryan Smith - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
"Has Anandtech staff ever explained why the promised review never materialized?"Honestly, we're busy and despite our best efforts, sometimes bite off more than we can chew. Especially as we have imperfect vision about what products may show up on our doorsteps tomorrow.