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Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11792/the-sandisk-ultra-3d-1tb-and-western-digital-wd-blue-3d-nand-1tb-ssd-review



Western Digital, and its subsidiary SanDisk, have had some of the best performing planar TLC SATA SSD components in recent memory, so the bar is high for a new generation of SSDs. This review covers two drives which have the same design but differ in name only: the SanDisk Ultra 3D 1TB, and the Western Digital WD Blue 3D 1TB. Each drive will be targeted to the customer bases that appeal to each brand name.

The new drives don't change the basic formula that has worked in the past: the controller is the same Marvell 88SS1074 used in the original WD Blue SSD, and SanDisk is still developing the firmware in-house. SanDisk was a relatively early adopter of TLC NAND flash for consumer SSDs, starting with the Ultra II introduced in 2014. Prior to adopting 3D NAND, they had already moved to using TLC for their mainstream client drives, not just for entry level products. The original WD Blue SSD from last year used 15nm TLC, as did their flagship business/OEM SanDisk X400 client SSD.

SanDisk's 3D NAND, now in its third generation, is finally ready for mainstream SSDs. The NAND is a BiCS3 3D design, which uses a 64-layer charge trap flash design and is shared with Toshiba's 3D NAND. Western Digital has launched this 3D NAND in the retail market with a SATA drive that is being sold under both their SanDisk and WD brands. Like almost all current consumer SSDs with 3D NAND, the new SanDisk Ultra 3D and WD Blue 3D NAND SSD uses 3D TLC NAND flash.

Toshiba's version of this 3D NAND debuted in the Toshiba XG5 M.2 NVMe SSD for the OEM market, a drive we were quite impressed by. The SATA interface will limit how much the drives in this review can improve performance over their planar TLC predecessors, but there's still some room for improvement, especially around power consumption.

SanDisk Ultra 3D and WD Blue 3D NAND Specifications
Capacity 250 GB 500 GB 1TB 2TB
Controller Marvell 88SS1074
NAND SanDisk 64-layer 3D TLC
Form Factor 2.5" 7mm
M.2 2280 (WD Blue only)
Sequential Read 550 MB/s 560 MB/s 560 MB/s 560 MB/s
Sequential Write 525 MB/s 530 MB/s 530 MB/s 530 MB/s
4KB Random Read IOPS 95k 95k 95k 95k
4KB Random Write IOPS 81k 84k 84k 84k
Idle Power (Slumber) 56 mW
Idle Power (DevSlp) 5-7 mW 5-12 mW
Write Endurance 100 TB 200 TB 400 TB 500 TB
Warranty Three years
MSRP $94.99 $164.99 $309.99 $619.99

The new WD Blue 3D NAND serves as the successor to the original WD Blue SSD, while the SanDisk Ultra 3D is a long-overdue replacement for the Ultra II. Both of the new products use the same technology under the hood; they differ primarily in the stickers on the outside of the drive and the retail packaging it arrives in. The product family includes capacities from 250GB to 2TB, and there is a M.2 SATA version available under the WD Blue branding. (The 2TB M.2 WD Blue 3D NAND has been announced but is not yet available.)

The performance and power specifications of the new WD/SanDisk drives are typical for a mainstream or high-end SATA SSD. Endurance ratings are good at slightly more than 0.3 drive writes per day, except for the 2TB model that is rated for just over 0.2 DWPD over the course of the three-year warranty.

For this review, Western Digital provided a 1TB WD Blue 3D NAND and a 1TB SanDisk Ultra 3D. Since these drives only differ cosmetically, their benchmark results should theoretically be the same. Any variations are due either to variability in our own tests, or to manufacturing variability that would be similar for two samples of the same model. We requested different capacities, which may come at a later date, although companies like to show off their best hand first - a 1TB drive is in peak of performance while not being as power hungry as a 2TB drive. It would still be interesting to get the other drives in to test, however.

This review will compare the WD Blue 3D NAND and the SanDisk Ultra 3D against the following drives:

  • Last year's WD Blue, using SanDisk 15nm TLC and the same Marvell 88SS1074 controller
  • The SanDisk X400, a slightly earlier drive using the same planar TLC and Marvell controller as the original WD Blue, but with different firmware and less overprovisioning.
  • The Crucial MX300, Crucial BX300 and Intel 545s, representing all three variants of Intel/Micron 3D NAND that have hit the market so far. The MX300 uses 32L 3D TLC and the Marvell 88SS1074 and is the closest competitor to the new WD/SanDisk drives.
  • The Samsung 850 PRO and 850 EVO, using Samsung 3D NAND and Samsung controllers.
  • The Patriot Ignite 960GB, OCZ VX500 and OCZ Trion 150 (now branded TR150), all using 15nm planar NAND from Toshiba and thus comparable to the previous generation WD/SanDisk drives, but with controllers from Phison and Toshiba instead of Marvell.
AnandTech 2017 SSD Testbed
CPU Intel Xeon E3 1240 v5
Motherboard ASRock Fatal1ty E3V5 Performance Gaming/OC
Chipset Intel C232
Memory 4x 8GB G.SKILL Ripjaws DDR4-2400 CL15
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 5450, 1920x1200@60Hz
Software Windows 10 x64, version 1703
Linux kernel version 4.12, fio version 2.21


AnandTech 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.

ATSB - The Destroyer (Data Rate)
Orange is for the new drives, Blue is for the previous generation models

The new 3D NAND gives a minimal improvement in average data rate on The Destroyer for Western Digital's SSDs. SanDisk's 3D NAND is faster than Micron's first-generation 32L 3D TLC NAND as used in the Crucial MX300, but not quite as fast as the second-generation 64L 3D TLC in the Intel 545s. The Samsung 850 EVO remains the fastest SATA SSD with TLC on this test.

ATSB - The Destroyer (Average Latency)ATSB - The Destroyer (99th Percentile Latency)

The new WD Blue and SanDisk Ultra 3D show substantial improvements in both average and 99th percentile latency, putting them on par with the Samsung 850 PRO and ahead of any other SATA TLC SSD.

ATSB - The Destroyer (Average Read Latency)ATSB - The Destroyer (Average Write Latency)

The average read and write latency on The Destroyer have both improved with SanDisk's 3D TLC compared to the planar 15nm TLC, with the more significant improvement being to write latency, where the new Western Digital SSDs are at the top of the chart.

ATSB - The Destroyer (99th Percentile Read Latency)ATSB - The Destroyer (99th Percentile Write Latency)

The 99th percentile latencies don't show quite as much improvement as the averages above, but there is still a clear improvement for both reads and writes that put the new WD and SanDisk drives ahead of anything else that uses TLC.

ATSB - The Destroyer (Power)

Energy efficiency is much improved with SanDisk's 3D TLC compared to their 15nm planar TLC. The Crucial MX300 uses a bit less energy despite being slower on The Destroyer, and the Intel 545s with its Silicon Motion controller still comes out on top. While Samsung's older 850 PRO and 850 EVO are still quite good in terms of performance, their energy usage now stands out as higher than the modern competition.



AnandTech 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. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.

ATSB - Heavy (Data Rate)
Orange is for the new drives, Blue is for the previous generation models

The new WD and SanDisk SSDs offer improved average data rates on the Heavy test. Their peak performance when the test is run on an empty drive rivals Samsung's 850 EVO, but Samsung still has the clear advantage in performance consistency with the best performance on a full drive.

ATSB - Heavy (Average Latency)ATSB - Heavy (99th Percentile Latency)

Average and 99th percentile latencies are both improved, placing the new WD and SanDisk SSDs in the top performance tier for SATA drives. The 99th percentile latency results in particular show improved handling of a full drive.

ATSB - Heavy (Average Read Latency)ATSB - Heavy (Average Write Latency)

Average read and write latencies on the Heavy test have both been reduced by more than 10%, putting the new Western Digital SSDs on par with their modern 3D NAND competitors.

ATSB - Heavy (99th Percentile Read Latency)ATSB - Heavy (99th Percentile Write Latency)

The 99th percentile read and write latencies show even larger improvement than the averages, with reductions of more than 20% for the WD and SanDisk 3D NAND drives compared to the preceding planar TLC drives.  The 99th percentile write latency is now in the top tier, but the 99th percentile read latency has merely improved to average as the MLC SSDs all beat the TLC SSDs on that metric.

ATSB - Heavy (Power)

Energy efficiency on the Heavy test has clearly improved with Western Digital's switch to 3D NAND, but the Intel/Micron SSDs still come out ahead, and even the Toshiba OCZ VX500 with planar MLC is more efficient so long as the test is run on an empty drive.



AnandTech Storage Bench - Light

Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.

ATSB - Light (Data Rate)
Orange is for the new drives, Blue is for the previous generation models

The new Western Digital 3D NAND SSDs don't show any improvement in average data rate on the Light test when the test is run on an empty drive, but performance when the drive is full is slightly better.

ATSB - Light (Average Latency)ATSB - Light (99th Percentile Latency)

The average and 99th percentile latencies generally show no meaningful change for the new 3D NAND SSDs over their planar TLC predecessors; both new and old generations fall within the normal range of variation for most of their competitors. The full-drive latency scores for the new Western Digital 3D NAND SSDs are slightly improved and the difference between full and empty drive performance is relatively small.

ATSB - Light (Average Read Latency)ATSB - Light (Average Write Latency)

Splitting the average latency by reads and writes doesn't reveal anything interesting about the WD and SanDisk drives, though it does show that the drives with poor full-drive performance differ in how they are affected: the Crucial MX300 has significantly higher read and write latency, while the OCZ VX500 is mostly affected on the write side and the OCZ Trion 150 is mostly affected on the read side.

ATSB - Light (99th Percentile Read Latency)ATSB - Light (99th Percentile Write Latency)

There's a small but clear improvement to 99th percentile read latency for the new WD/SanDisk drives, while the 99th percentile write latencies are quite similar for almost all of the drives in this bunch.

ATSB - Light (Power)

The energy usage differences between most of these SSDs are insignificant; only the Crucial MX300 stands out with clearly lower power consumption than the WD/SanDisk drives. The Samsung and Phison-based drives use more energy than most.



Random Read Performance

Our first test of random read performance uses very short bursts of operations issued one at a time with no queuing. The drives are given enough idle time between bursts to yield an overall duty cycle of 20%, so thermal throttling is impossible. Each burst consists of a total of 32MB of 4kB random reads, from a 16GB span of the disk. The total data read is 1GB.

Burst 4kB Random Read (Queue Depth 1)
Orange is for the new drives, Blue is for the previous generation models

The switch to 3D NAND gives a clear boost to the random read performance of Western Digital's SSDs. The WD Blue was already in second place, but it has now narrowed the Samsung 850 PRO's lead.

Our sustained random read performance is similar to the random read test from our 2015 test suite: queue depths from 1 to 32 are tested, and the average performance and power efficiency across QD1, QD2 and QD4 are reported as the primary scores. Each queue depth is tested for one minute or 32GB of data transferred, whichever is shorter. After each queue depth is tested, the drive is given up to one minute to cool off so that the higher queue depths are unlikely to be affected by accumulated heat build-up. The individual read operations are again 4kB, and cover a 64GB span of the drive.

Sustained 4kB Random Read

The performance boost from 3D NAND doesn't disappear on the longer random read test: the new Western Digital SSDs are able to hold on to second place, this time much closer to the Samsung 850 PRO in performance.

Sustained 4kB Random Read (Power Efficiency)

The WD/SanDisk drives already had great power efficiency for random reads, but the 3D NAND improves it even more. The Intel 545s still has the clear lead, but it isn't such a wide margin anymore.

The performance scaling behavior of the SanDisk Ultra 3D and WD Blue 3D NAND are quite similar to other top-performing drives, with performance mostly saturated by QD16. The power consumption is much lower and scales more gradually than on Samsung's drives.

Random Write Performance

Our test of random write burst performance is structured similarly to the random read burst test, but each burst is only 4MB and the total test length is 128MB. The 4kB random write operations are distributed over a 16GB span of the drive, and the operations are issued one at a time with no queuing.

Burst 4kB Random Write (Queue Depth 1)

The older WD/SanDisk drives had some trouble with QD1 burst random write performance, but the new 3D NAND drives are as fast as any other TLC SATA SSDs on this test, and not too far behind the 3D MLC drives.

As with the sustained random read test, our sustained 4kB random write test runs for up to one minute or 32GB per queue depth, covering a 64GB span of the drive and giving the drive up to 1 minute of idle time between queue depths to allow for write caches to be flushed and for the drive to cool down.

Sustained 4kB Random Write

On the longer test that brings in higher queue depths, the WD and SanDisk drives still fare poorly even with 3D NAND. Toshiba manages to deliver a better score with their OCZ Trion 150 using 15nm planar TLC, even though the Trion 150 was in last place for QD1 random write performance.

Sustained 4kB Random Write (Power Efficiency)

In spite of poor performance, the WD and SanDisk 3D NAND drives have good power efficiency that is on par with Samsung, but behind the Intel and Micron 3D NAND SSDs.

Most of these SSDs reach their full random write performance by QD4 and don't gain anything from higher queue depths. The WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D fit this description too, but with a remarkably sub-par performance at saturation.



Sequential Read Performance

Our first test of sequential read performance uses short bursts of 128MB, issued as 128kB operations with no queuing. The test averages performance across eight bursts for a total of 1GB of data transferred from a drive containing 16GB of data. Between each burst the drive is given enough idle time to keep the overall duty cycle at 20%.

Burst 128kB Sequential Read (Queue Depth 1)
Orange is for the new drives, Blue is for the previous generation models

The burst sequential read speeds of almost all of these SATA drives are essentially equivalent; the slightly lower scores from the new WD and SanDisk drives are not a meaningful drop from the previous generation.

Our test of sustained sequential reads uses queue depths from 1 to 32, with the performance and power scores computed as the average of QD1, QD2 and QD4. Each queue depth is tested for up to one minute or 32GB transferred, from a drive containing 64GB of data.

Sustained 128kB Sequential Read

On the longer test of sequential reads, the WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D end up in the second tier of SSDs, tied with the Intel 545s and Toshiba's MLC-based OCZ VX500, but Samsung's 850 PRO and 850 EVO still have a substantial performance advantage.

Sustained 128kB Sequential Read (Power Efficiency)

The power efficiency of the WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D is excellent, trailing behind only the MLC-based OCZ VX500 that also uses a reduced amount of external DRAM. The previous generation of SanDisk and WD drives had the same power efficiency as Samsung's 850 PRO and EVO, which was good by last year's standards.

From QD1 to QD2, the WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D see a slight improvement in sequential read performance and don't benefit any further from higher queue depths. The Samsung 850 PRO and 850 EVO both show a much larger jump in performance from QD1 to QD2, leading to a higher steady-state sequential read speed. The OCZ VX500 can actually match the Samsung drives at high queue depths, but it doesn't saturate until QD4.

Sequential Write Performance

Our test of sequential write burst performance is structured identically to the sequential read burst performance test save for the direction of the data transfer. Each burst writes 128MB as 128kB operations issued at QD1, for a total of 1GB of data written to a drive containing 16GB of data.

Burst 128kB Sequential Write (Queue Depth 1)

As with sequential reads, the burst sequential write speed of the new WD and SanDisk drives is slightly reduced from the preceding generation, but the performance isn't low enough to make the new drives stand out from the crowd.

Our test of sustained sequential writes is structured identically to our sustained sequential read test, save for the direction of the data transfers. Queue depths range from 1 to 32 and each queue depth is tested for up to one minute or 32GB, followed by up to one minute of idle time for the drive to cool off and perform garbage collection. The test is confined to a 64GB span of the drive.

Sustained 128kB Sequential Write

The performance of the WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D on the longer sequential write test is much improved from the previous generation of drives, but still rather slow compared to the competition.

Sustained 128kB Sequential Write (Power Efficiency)

With a substantial performance boost, the power efficiency of the latest WD/SanDisk SSDs is now about average, and is competitive with Samsung's drives but far lower than what the Crucial MX300 or OCZ VX500 offer.

The mediocre sustained sequential write performance of the new WD/SanDisk 3D NAND SSDs is due to a combination of relatively low performance once the drive has reached its full performance, and a slow ramp up that is still not quite at full speed by QD4. Most drives are operating at or very near their full performance at QD2.



Mixed Random Performance

Our test of mixed random reads and writes covers mixes varying from pure reads to pure writes at 10% increments. Each mix is tested for up to 1 minute or 32GB of data transferred. The test is conducted with a queue depth of 4, and is limited to a 64GB span of the drive. In between each mix, the drive is given idle time of up to one minute so that the overall duty cycle is 50%.

Mixed 4kB Random Read/Write
Orange is for the new drives, Blue is for the previous generation models

The mixed random I/O performance of the WD Blue 3D NAND and the SanDisk Ultra 3D is significantly better than the previous generation, but the improvement is not enough to match any of the other 3D NAND SSDs. The Samsung, Intel and Micron drives with 3D NAND are all still much faster overall on this test.

Mixed 4kB Random Read/Write (Power Efficiency)

The power efficiency of the WD/SanDisk drives has improved to a larger degree than performance, but is still slightly worse than Samsung's 850 EVO and 850 PRO, and is far lower than the Crucial MX300 and the Intel 545s.

Both generations of WD/SanDisk drives show fairly flat performance across most of the mixed random I/O test, with only a modest spike at the end when the workload shifts to pure random writes. Most of the other drives either have steady performance increases across the test as the proportion of writes grows, or a much larger spike in performance at the very end.

Mixed Sequential Performance

Our test of mixed sequential reads and writes differs from the mixed random I/O test by performing 128kB sequential accesses rather than 4kB accesses at random locations, and the sequential test is conducted at queue depth 1. The range of mixes tested is the same, and the timing and limits on data transfers are also the same as above.

Mixed 128kB Sequential Read/Write

The mixed sequential I/O performance of the WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D is comparable to the Intel and Micron 3D NAND drives, and only slightly behind Samsung's 850 PRO and 850 EVO.

Mixed 128kB Sequential Read/Write (Power Efficiency)

The new WD/SanDisk drives have good power efficiency on the mixed sequential I/O test, but the Intel/Micron 3D NAND SSDs are still slightly better, and the OCZ VX500 is still on top.

The performance of the WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D across the mixed sequential I/O test is mostly flat, with the occasional blip. The Samsung drives achieve their standout performance by maintaining better performance through the read-heavy first half of the test, and only experiencing a relatively short and shallow drop in performance during the second half of the test. The Crucial MX300 achieves a very similar overall average to the WD/SanDisk drives but with relatively lower performance during the read-heavy portions of the test and clearly higher performance on the write-heavy half.



Power Management

Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.

SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.

Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.

We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled.

Active Idle Power Consumption (No LPM)
Orange is for the new drives, Blue is for the previous generation models

Idle Power Consumption

Not much has changed with the power management situation for the WD and SanDisk drives; they're still using the same Marvell 88SS1074 controller, and the choice of NAND doesn't have much effect on idle power. Both active idle and slumber state idle power draw are good.

Idle Wake-Up Latency

The idle wake-up latency of the WD/SanDisk drives is plenty quick, but not quite as fast as the Phison-based drives. The drives that most often outperform the WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D all take several times longer to wake up from idle.



Conclusion

Compared to last year's WD Blue that used planar TLC NAND flash, the new WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D perform much better on tests where the older drive was weakest. At lower queue depths where the bandwidth of the SATA link was not a bottleneck, the new SSDs delivered significantly better random read and write performance than their predecessors. But the SATA bus has limited how much of a peak improvement 3D NAND could make for the raw performance of Western Digital's SSDs. 

Compared to the competing drives on the market today, the new WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D have the performance that is expected of a mainstream SATA SSD. On most real-world workloads, there's no noticeable performance difference between the Ultra 3D and the Samsung 850 EVO. The Ultra 3D also handles being full better than most TLC drives, and does not show the spike in latency that several drives like the Crucial MX300 exhibit. Overall, it is clear that SanDisk is still very good at managing TLC flash and implementing SLC caching in a way that has almost no downsides.

The switch to 3D NAND also brings substantial power savings to the WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D. Idle power is unchanged from the previous generation of drives, but power draw under load is much lower.

  240-275GB 480-525GB 960-1050GB 2TB
SanDisk Ultra 3D $89.99 (36¢/GB) $149.99 (30¢/GB) $284.99 (29¢/GB) $549.99 (28¢/GB)
WD Blue 3D NAND $94.99 (38¢/GB) $164.99 (33¢/GB) $309.99 (31¢/GB) $619.99 (31¢/GB)
Crucial BX300 $89.99 (38¢/GB) $149.99 (31¢/GB)    
Crucial MX300 $92.99 (34¢/GB) $149.99 (29¢/GB) $284.47 (27¢/GB) $544.62 (27¢/GB)
ADATA SU800 $91.99 (36¢/GB) $154.99 (30¢/GB) $269.99 (27¢/GB)  
Intel SSD 545s $99.99 (39¢/GB) $209.00 (41¢/GB)    
Samsung 850 PRO $104.99 (41¢/GB) $209.09 (41¢/GB) $406.00 (40¢/GB) $859.99 (42¢/GB)
Samsung 850 EVO $89.99 (36¢/GB) $147.99 (30¢/GB) $327.00 (33¢/GB) $697.99 (35¢/GB)

Current pricing for the Western Digital SSDs is a bit odd. The WD Blue 3D NAND is more expensive than the SanDisk Ultra 3D by several cents per GB despite the two products being the same under the sticker. The only reason to go with the WD Blue 3D NAND at the moment is for the M.2 version, since the SanDisk Ultra 3D is only available in the 2.5" form factor.

The SanDisk Ultra 3D is priced in between the Crucial MX300 and the Samsung 850 EVO. This matches their relative performance. The performance advantage of the 850 EVO is quite small for most real-world workloads, so its premium mostly buys you a longer warranty and the proven maturity of a product that has been on the market for a long time. If your workload is heavy enough for the difference between the 850 EVO and the Ultra 3D to matter, you should probably be shopping for a NVMe SSD instead of SATA. Meanwhile, the SanDisk Ultra 3D offers higher write endurance ratings and lower power consumption for a slightly lower price. The Ultra 3D makes more sense for most consumers.

Between the SanDisk Ultra 3D and the Crucial MX300, the Ultra 3D should be preferred for heavier workloads. The MX300 will get you an extra 25 or 50GB for the same price, but if you fill up the drive enough for that slightly higher capacity to come into play, the Ultra 3D will perform better. The MX300 still has the advantage in power efficiency and is the better pick for mobile use.

With a good balance of price, performance and power efficiency, the SanDisk Ultra 3D is an easy recommendation.


Recommended by AnandTech
The SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD (1TB)

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