WD – Blue 1TB internal SATA Solid State Drive review – can you store games?

The Western Digital Blue 3D 1TB offers excellent performance at an honest price point. The drive is within a couple of performance points of the 850 EVO, but it sells at a way lower cost . you will not be disappointed during this choice. Find details in WD – Blue 1TB Internal SATA Solid State Drive Review.

Pros & Cons

FOR
MLC-Like performance
Aggressive endurance rating
Low price point
Bundled software suite

AGAINST
Some TLC consistency issues

Features – WD – Blue 1TB Internal SATA Solid State Drive Review

SanDisk and manufacturing partner Toshiba seem late to the 3D party. Their venture leveraged planar NAND longer than many industry rivals while simultaneously ramping up 3D NAND production for other markets. 3D BiCS NAND has shipped for a minimum of a year primarily in mobile devices, but the third revision, now up to 64-layers high, is that the next intensify the ladder and SSD worthy.

The WD Blue and SanDisk Ultra come to plug because the first SATA SSDs with 3D BiCS, but both drives have identical hardware and specifications. the businesses decide to use the duo to tackle two distinct markets. The WD Blue will target channel, distribution, resellers, and system integrator builds for DIY enthusiasts. The SanDisk Ultra will target brick and mortar retail stores and end-users within the upgrade market, with attention on creative types. that does not mean much to us because both sell at Amazon, Newegg, and B&H Photo.

Most of the models are already shipping, and you’ll buy them today. The 2TB models in 2.5-inch and M.2 2280 form factors will come later within the quarter when the corporate develops larger packages with increased density.

We’ve already tested the new 3D TLC flash within the Toshiba XG5, an OEM-focused NVMe SSD, and located it to supply robust performance. BiCS is extremely “Samsung-like” because it’s real high-performance TLC, in contrast to planar (2D) TLC that hides its low performance behind SLC buffers. just like the Samsung 850 EVO, the new Blue and Ultra 3D SSDs don’t lose a big amount of performance after sustained write activity. the road graph above is from our third consecutive HD Tune Pro run, which may be a test that writes sequential data to the whole usable capacity of the SSD. we will reach an equivalent maximum speed with Toshiba’s 15nm planar NAND, but it only lasts for a couple of seconds before the workload saturates the SLC buffer, while the Blue’s BiCS NAND doesn’t suffer an equivalent fate. That’s excellent news for end users because large file transfers won’t drop to HDD performance levels.

Specifications

The differences between the Western Digital Blue 3D and SanDisk Ultra are mostly cosmetic. The Blue 3D also ships in an M.2 2280 single-sided form factor, while the Ultra will only ship within the 2.5″ form factor.

The two series come to plug in four capacities that span from 250GB to 2TB, but the 2TB models are delayed. they’re going to appear later within the year in both 2.5″ and M.2 2280 (single-sided) models for the Blue 3D lineup. B&H Photo already lists the SanDisk Ultra 3D in 2TB, but only as a preorder item.

WD – Blue 1TB Internal SATA Solid State Drive Review

The high-capacity models provide 560/530 MB/s of sequential read/write throughput, while the 250GB model drops 550/525 MB/s. Random performance weighs in at 95,000/84,000 read/write IOPS for many models, but the 250GB drops to 81,000 write IOPS.

WD tapped the Marvell 88SS1074 4-channel controller with low-density redundant check (LDPC) error correction. this is often an equivalent controller WD utilized in the older Blue SSD that began shipping in 2016. Crucial also uses the controller within the MX300. The controller has yet to impress us with the products we’ve tested, but which will change today. BiCS will only are available TLC flavors for consumer SSDs, but it’s going to be ready to take up the slack and permit the 88SS1074 to spread its wings–its performance surprised us in our XG5 preview article. Both Toshiba and SanDisk avoided a number of our deep dive questions on program timing, planes, and architecture, so we’re forced to match the flash in end products instead of on paper. Conversely, Samsung has no problem publishing detailed V-NAND specifications.

The WD/Toshiba venture has 64-layer BiCS NAND die in 256Gbit and 512Gbit capacities, but the businesses won’t disclose which die they use within the Blue and Ultra. We experienced an equivalent with Toshiba’s XG5. Toshiba hasn’t released the 2TB XG5, and WD/SanDisk hasn’t shipped the 2TB Blue/Ultra models, so I assume all the products we’ve tested use the 256Gbit die. The 2TB models may need to await the 512Gbit die, but it could even be a delay in building high-capacity NAND packages for the larger models.

Pricing, Warranty & Endurance

We found about one among the drives listed at B&H Photo. The pricing changed for the SanDisk Ultra 3D drives a couple of times while we monitored the action, but it seems to possess stabilized now. The low-capacity WD Blue 3D models appear to possess a rather lower cost than the Ultra 3D equivalents. as an example , the WD Blue 3D 250GB retails for $89.99, but the Ultra 3D 250GB is $99.99.

B&H also lists the SanDisk Ultra 3D 2TB for $549.99, but it doesn’t list the WD Blue 2TB. Pricing scales up with the 2 mid-capacity models, but expect to pay around $150 for the 500GB and $280 for the 1TB early during the first release cycle. Resellers tend to list WD products at higher prices initially then lower them within a couple of weeks. we have seen it happen several times with the company’s HDDs–some of the worth reductions have even been large enough to vary our opinion about the merchandise . we do not expect to ascertain any $100 price drops with these products like we have seen within the past with high-capacity HDDs, though.

Western Digital and SanDisk back their first 3D SATA SSDs with a three-year limited warranty. The 250GB features a 100TBW endurance rating, which doubles for every capacity up to the 1TB drive’s 400TBW. The 2TB models feature a 500TBW rating, which may be a modest endurance increase over the 1TB’s 400TBW.

WD tells us that the majority users only write around 10GB of knowledge per day after the initial system setup and software installation. That’s in line with our expectations of normal user activity.

Software

Both WD and SanDisk provide free access to the SSD Dashboard software suite. Sadly, the software won’t work across both product families; you cannot use the WD version to secure erase a SanDisk drive, for instance . The software is identical aside from product support and aesthetic changes that contains branding changes from red to blue, and the other way around .

The SSD Dashboard software is extremely powerful, but it isn’t as refined as a number of the opposite popular software suites. It does offer some features, like live disk performance monitoring, that we do not find with other software suites.

A Closer Look

We expect some initial confusion because both the older Blue and therefore the new Blue 3D SSDs are at retail simultaneously. We found the Blue 3D model we’re testing at Newegg under its specific product number, but its item description was for the older Blue (2016). The listing even had user reviews from the older product, so you will need to be very careful when ordering. Retail shoppers are going to be ready to spot the “3D NAND” on the merchandise package face to face .

SanDisk Ultra 3D

The SanDisk drives features even more 3D marketing on the retail package, so it’ll be easy to inform the difference between the older Ultra and new Ultra with 3D NAND.

The Ultra 3D ships with an insert reminding you to download the SSD Dashboard software, but the Blue doesn’t. Both accompany a guaranty statement/guide and have identical hardware inside the plastic case. We spoke with the merchandise manager and learned that both drives would use an equivalent build of materials, so you will not need to worry about either series moving over to the performance-reducing 512Gbit die later if it originally shipped with the 256Gbit die.

1TB Performance Testing – WD – Blue 1TB Internal SATA Solid State Drive Review

We really just like the WD Blue 3D and SanDisk Ultra 3D 1TB’s price point. The SSDs come to plug at $280, which is well under the Samsung 850 EVO’s current $310 price point. The EVO sells for $370 at Newegg at the time of writing. the worth gap provides the new WD/SanDisk drives an enormous enough pricing advantage to offer them a touch slack when it involves performance. Many of the opposite products in our performance charts came to plug with somewhat disappointing pricing that matches the 850 EVO.

Sequential Read Performance

To examine our storage tests in-depth, please inspect How We Test HDDs And SSDs.

Western Digital Blue 3D (250GB) (16GB 16GB RAM) at Amazon for $40.48

It’s nice to ascertain WD/SanDisk 3D NAND products come to plug at aggressive price points, but this section of the article is all about performance.

There is little or no variation between the SATA 6Gb/s SSDs during the sequential read test. Surprisingly, the Mushkin Reactor, the sole model with MLC flash, is that the slowest. The new WD/SanDisk SSDs lead the charge with 554 MB/s of throughput, which is just about the limit of the SATA interface. once we tested the XG5, Toshiba told us the new flash was fast and to not specialise in the TLC aspect. The underlying technology is that the same for SanDisk’s BiCS NAND, and it appears the impressive performance carries over to SATA products also .

The two drives we’re that specialize in come very on the brink of the Samsung 850 EVO in sequential write performance. The difference is little enough to overlook, but that’s not the complete story.

Full Usable Capacity Sequential Write Test

We wrote to the WD Blue 3D’s full addressable capacity 3 times , and altogether three tests, we couldn’t see a rattle down from the SLC buffer. Unlike most other TLC-based products, the drive can write 128KB data at a queue depth (QD) of 1 up to 460 MB/s without a big performance drop.

TLC BiCS NAND provides a huge improvement over older 15nm TLC, but some carry over artifacts survive . within the chart, you’ll see some latency outliers (yellow dots). To be fair, we also recorded outliers with Samsung’s 3-bit per cell V-NAND, too.

Random Read Performance

The Blue 3D and Ultra 3D don’t quite break the ten ,000 IOPS watermark during the random read test. the 2 drives are very close and also scale well with increased intensity. Between QD4 and QD8, the 2 BiCS-powered SSDs surpass the 850 EVO’s random read performance.

Random Write Performance

Almost all the products perform an equivalent in low-QD random write tests. The manufacturers and controller designers have increased random write performance such a lot that it isn’t a problem for many users. There was a time when testing random write performance was a serious focus with consumer SSDs, but that day has long passed.

80% Mixed Sequential Workload
We describe our mixed workload testing intimately here and describe our steady state tests here.

Now, mixed workload performance takes priority because your SSD is consistently reading and writing small files even without user interaction. regardless of what you are doing on your PC, there’s some mixture of reads and writes. Smaller SSD manufacturers don’t specialise in mixed performance tuning, but larger companies have made it standard practice.

80% Mixed Random Workload

The two BiCS SSDs deliver excellent sequential and mixed random performance. The drives aren’t always the fastest in each of the varied queue depths, but they’re often at the upper end of the size .

Sequential Steady-State

We’ve tested the Marvell 88SS1074 4-channel controller with planar NAND and Micron’s 384Gbit 3D NAND, but we came away unimpressed. you’ll even see two of the leads to these charts with the first WD Blue and Crucial MX300. The charts show a number of the higher TLC (and a sole MLC) products available today. We’ve tested SSDs with lower 80% read results (around 120 MB/s).

The new Blue 3D and Ultra 3D stand out from the group of the simplest TLC-based SSDs. The drives even outperform the 850 Pro 1TB within the sequential steady-state test. Samsung designed the professional series to deal with this sort of workload.

Random Steady-State

The new BiCS drives don’t deliver an equivalent performance consistency that we see from MLC flash, but it’s far better than most of the planar NAND SSDs we’ve tested. We aren’t keen on recommending these drives for a high-performance RAID 0 array; most will choose faster NVMe SSDs for that task.

WD – Blue 1TB Internal SATA Solid State Drive benchmark Review

PCMark 8 Real-World Software Performance
For details on our real-world software performance testing, please click here.

PC Mark 8 leverages real-world software to live performance and is such a widely used benchmark that even the SSD manufacturers recognize it as an industry standard.

The two BiCS SSDs come very on the brink of the 850 EVO 1TB altogether the tests, but they fail to overtake the EVO in any workload.

Application Storage Bandwidth

The new drives deliver around 40 MB/s less performance than the 850 EVO. On the surface, it is a loss, but once you think about the worth and “close enough” performance, it’s clear that Western Digital features a winner here.

PCMark 8 Advanced Workload Performance
To learn how we test advanced workload performance, please click here.

The new BiCS SSDs obliterate the 850 EVO 1TB once they get over an important workload. It’s notable that the 1TB EVO is that the slowest during this test compared to the opposite 850 EVO capacities, largely because the SSD takes longer to recover. this is often actually a second-generation 850 EVO 1TB model with 48-layer V-NAND, but the drive originally came to plug with 32-layer V-NAND. Samsung changed the flash to decrease costs.

Total Service Time
The service time results reveal the new WD and SanDisk drives have very tight latency numbers even under extreme duress. These are the primary SATA SSDs that come within striking distance of the Samsung 850 Pro and SanDisk Extreme PRO. We’ve waited over three years for today to return .

Disk Busy Time

The drives delivered one among rock bottom disk busy time scores we’ve recorded with SATA SSDs during the steady state portion of the test.

Responsiveness Test
\The responsiveness score comes from a sub-test within the BAPCo SYSmark 2014 SE suite. The software uses real-world applications from Microsoft, Adobe, et al. to run an office simulation and record several performance and power statistics. The responsiveness sub-test quantifies the user experience supported latency.

The new BiCS SSDs from both Western Digital and SanDisk deliver identical responsiveness scores and nearly identical power consumption results. during this section, we specialise in the performance score instead of the facility consumption measurement. The drives have impressive performance that beats the WD Blue released last year. The SSDs still score well under the Samsung 850 EVO, though.

Notebook Battery Life – WD – Blue 1TB Internal SATA Solid State Drive Review

We use BAPCo’s MobileMark 2012.5 software to live notebook battery life during a Lenovo Y700-17 gaming system. just like the SYSmark suite, MobileMark uses software from Microsoft, Adobe, et al. to get a real-world workload. during this test, we run the laptop on battery power until it expires, which allows us to check with the system buses running during a low power state. It also measures battery life with the SSD being the sole variable.

Conclusion

Samsung’s 850 EVO came to plug within the shadow of the 850 Pro and SanDisk Extreme Pro three long years ago. The EVO was one among the primary TLC SSDs, but TLC-based products from other companies were just coming to plug , and their poor performance hurt the perception of the new NAND. the 2 Pro products went on to make a replacement hyper-class of high-performance products that have yet to be rivaled, but the 850 EVO became the mainstream standard. The EVO’s performance was a clear advantage, but Samsung spent the last three years adjusting its price supported competition. When companies lower their mainstream SSD pricing to realize market share, Samsung swoops in and adjusts EVO pricing to only a couple of dollars more. that creates it easy for users to splurge a touch for the 850 EVO and leaves other SSD manufacturers frustrated.

The song and dance has played on for 3 years now. As an SSD reviewer, I’ve felt it had been time to vary the channel for quite a while . we do not have anything against Samsung or the EVO; it’s just more fun to write down about new products that leap over previous products every few months.

The Western Digital Blue 3D and SanDisk Ultra 3D are the primary products we have seen that put a true dent within the 850 EVO’s dominance. The new drives aren’t quite as fast because the EVO, but they’re very close. i feel they’re just a firmware update or two away. Neither company mentioned performance-boosting firmware updates, but companies are always turning knobs within the test lab to squeeze every drop of performance out of their designs. For now, the Blue 3D and Ultra 3D are close enough that we’d like to seem past the raw performance to match these products.

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