Overall and Final Verdict

If any of you have had any experience with Western Digital hard drives, they don’t really go around tossing the black branding on just anything. Even back in the day when they first introduced their own SSDs, they avoided it. It only goes on their fastest drives and not surprisingly the new WD Black that they introduced at PAX is a performer. I put it through our test suite and with the exception of the Passmark workloads that are all enterprise focused it dominated. It even makes the Intel 750 Series look slow in some of these tests. I was especially impressed with the sequential performance, doubling the write speeds of the next fastest drive. The same thing happened in the Anvil IOPS results on the write speeds. Then when I dove into the queue depth performance I was happy to see that the WD Black never fell off in the high queue depth situations, in fact, it looked like it would keep climbing if I could toss more at it.

The single-sided M.2 design didn’t have any heatspreaders to spread the heat around but the thermal images when loading the drive showed that it keeps reasonably controlled even without any other cooling. The WD made controller is really the key to all of this, they took the same 3D NAND that was in the SATA based WD Blue drive and paired it with their new controller to great results. My only other complaint was really just about the naming. They both have NVMe on the box and drive, the only way to tell the difference is the newer drives have basic capacities like 250, 500, and 1000 or to look for the 3D NAND logo on the box for the new drives.

So where do these drives fit into the market? Well, obviously these are on the highest end of the SSD market. They are priced close to the Samsung 970 EVO on the 1TB capacity but cheaper at the 250 and 500 GB capacities. In fact that 25GB model at $94.99 is a nice value for an NVMe drive. It doesn’t perform as well as this 1TB model, especially on the writes, but should still be faster than anything else you find at that price point.

fv5tophonors

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Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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