The Western Digital Black PCIe SSD (512GB) Review
by Billy Tallis on March 8, 2017 8:30 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here.
As with The Destroyer, the WD Black's average data rate on the Heavy test is not beyond the reach of the very best SATA SSDs, but it is faster than most SATA SSDs, including the WD Blue. The WD Black also handles the pressure of a full drive better than many TLC SSDs and suffers relatively less performance drop than even some MLC-based PCIe SSDs like the Patriot Hellfire.
The average service time delivered by the WD Black scores in the low end of the range for PCIe SSDs but it is clearly better any SATA SSD. Once again the impact of running the test on a completely full drive is minimal.
The WD Black suffers from more high-latency operations over the course of the Heavy test than several SATA SSDs, but it ranks better than most budget TLC SSDs.
The WD Black's power efficiency during the Heavy test is only slightly better than the Intel SSD 600p. All of its MLC-based competition is at least a little bit more efficient, and Samsung's PCIe SSDs are much more efficient.
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Gothmoth - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
why would anyone buy this?if you want M.2 you want performance.. this is just crap.
GoMoeJoe - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
Price according to mediocre performance.Glad to see WD entering the space though.
WinterCharm - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
Horrible price to performance ratio... if you're going to gimp reads this much on an M.2 SSD, then at least give us 1TB for $200.herbc - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
Noticed top end SATA 2.5 inch SSD's jumped in price considerably lately. Samsung 850 Pro 256 GB went from $129.00 to around $150.00 in a week.Magichands8 - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
Pretty much none of these SSDs are worth buying until the prices get down to around $0.12/GB and even then with a proper form factor. I suppose if you're particularly desperate or require them for some special niche use-case they will serve a purpose, ignorance not withstanding, but otherwise I just don't see the point.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
At 39c/GB, most people are already seeing that SSDs are far superior to HDDs for a majority of use cases.Jad77 - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
It's Blue, not Black.Makaveli - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
I don't get WD they may performance competitive drives in the spinning HD space. Yet when is comes to SSD's and M.2, NVMe drives they are happy with being bottom feeders!I guess its probably "a day late a dollor short" meaning it took them so long to enter the market everyone else was already so far ahead.
creed3020 - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
That has been WD's slogan and approach to SSD based storage for years. We've been saying for years that HDD's relevancy will continue to shrink and if these giants want to survive into tomorrow then they need to innovate, which this product is clearly not an example of. Its barely an also ran.CoreLogicCom - Wednesday, March 8, 2017 - link
They just don't want to cannibalize the last remnants of their consumer hard drive business by producing SSDs that are faster than their hard drives...?