WD Blue 3D And SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD Review

[Guest]

SanDisk and parent company WD plan to take SATA to the max with two new SSDs designed to leverage new 3D TLC BiCS NAND. Can the these SSDs unseat the 850 EVO?

WD Blue 3D And SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD Review : Read more

 

[Ne0Wolf7]

Perfect timing or me, my SSD has only 20GB left. I wonder if we'll see and price changes soon...

 

[AgentLozen]

Great review. You guys must think pretty highly of these SSDs if you're giving them the Editor's Choice award.

A SSD that's a close competitor to the 850 EVO has been a long time coming. It's good to see that it's coming from Western Digital. When the Blue SSDs first came around, i recall that their prices were waaaay to high. WD has gotten it sorted out since then. Great for competition. Great for buyers.

 

[hannibal]

Yep... Good year!
CPU competition is back because of AMD and ssd competition is coming back because of these and some other new SSDs!
Intel is going to the right direction (at last have to say, by releasing more cores to customers) I am quite sure that Samsung also have to react, so quite soon we will see better products also from there!

 

[Brian_R170]

I just bought an Acer Spin 3 last week for my wife on Aug 7. All reviews said the laptop was good, but disk performance was abysmal, and they were right. I swapped out the 1TB Seagate 5400 RPM mechanical drive with a 1TB WD Blue on Aug 10. The difference was huge, but no way to directly compare to other SSDs. I didn't know much about the drive before purchasing, but I got a really good price on it. I was hoping I didn't make a mistake. This article puts my mind at ease.

 

[Randall_Lind]

I have two WD blues 512gb one not sure they are 3D ones for a Acer laptop and HP all-in-one. The acer one life is down to 98% brought it 2/23/16. The other one is 100% brought 3/9/17/. I know Why cry over 2% but this worries me about how long it will last. if I lose 2% a year seems like a lot to me. I am using the WD SSD dashboard software. This is how I know.

 

[Brian_R170]

@RANDALL_LIND, I'm fairly certain WD/Sandisk wasn't shipping 3D NAND in Feb 2016

 

[Sakkura]

I have two WD blues 512gb one not sure they are 3D ones for a Acer laptop and HP all-in-one. The acer one life is down to 98% brought it 2/23/16. The other one is 100% brought 3/9/17/. I know Why cry over 2% but this worries me about how long it will last. if I lose 2% a year seems like a lot to me. I am using the WD SSD dashboard software. This is how I know.

If your SSD loses 2% of its rated write endurance over the course of 18 months, that means it has enough write endurance for around 75 years of use.

Do you expect to be using your current SSDs well beyond the year 2090?

 

[NinjaNerd56]

I use a WD SSD in my server farm; excellent results.

My Christmas present to myself this year will be a 1TB or 2TB WD Blue for my game tower.

Woo hoo!

 

[wifiburger]

meh i passed on 3d ssd, i did get the wd black x4 pcie (2000 MB a sec )and wd blue ssd sata, good thing the ryzen mobo as two m.2 slots ?? less cables in my case

 

[the nerd 389]

@RANDALL_LIND, 2% is nothing, really. I'd only start to be concerned at 10-15% per year. I edit videos. I can eat through 10% in a couple of months. This is not the drive for me.

@Chris: Do you think you could present the variance/standard deviation for the performance consistency section? The 10%, 1%, and 0.1% transfer rates in steady state may also be useful, although perhaps not for this drive in particular.

 

[tshinhar]

At long last ssd that is not junk next to the 850 evo

 

[lucas_7_94]

Wow, great value!

 

[Vesi]

OK we understand, Western Digital dropped some serious sponsorship money to Tom's, but in real life numbers don't add up. Even you said it, they still don't match EVO's performance. Possible future firmware tweaking, that has no other source than imagination is rather silly argument. And hey, here are the lowest prices for 2TB in Europe:
1) WD Blue 3D = 620 eur.
2) SanDisk Ultra 3D = 609 eur.
3) 850 EVO = 571 eur.

 

[Sakkura]

OK we understand, Western Digital dropped some serious sponsorship money to Tom's, but in real life numbers don't add up. Even you said it, they still don't match EVO's performance. Possible future firmware tweaking, that has no other source than imagination is rather silly argument. And hey, here are the lowest prices for 2TB in Europe:
1) WD Blue 3D = 620 eur.
2) SanDisk Ultra 3D = 609 eur.
3) 850 EVO = 571 eur.

The performance does match up. If you look through the graphs, the WD/Sandisk drives frequently beat the 850 Evo, but also lose some. Overall they're about on par.

As for pricing, you can usually expect the price to be a bit high at launch, then falling gradually over the following weeks.

Because SSD prices change a lot over time, I generally think it's best to ignore the value for money conclusions in SSD reviews, because the conclusion would have to be updated daily to really remain relevant.

 

[CRamseyer]

Two things....

1. I don't check EU prices. I simply don't know where people shop across the pond. If you want to offer some suggestions please feel free to do so. Most of my writing takes place before the products hit the websites so for a majority of the reviews it wouldn't help.

2. I don't know who pays TH. It's none of my business. I'm as far away from that end of the business as I can be. No one calls me to say, "Be cool to WD this week."

Everyone that knows me also knows I would find a new site to write at if that happened. Please don't lob accusations that you can't back up.


As far as future firmware updates. If you own a Sandisk Ultra, Ultra II, Extreme, Extreme Pro or any number of other products from this team then you have updated the firmware at some point with Dashboard and experienced a performance increase. There isn't an update guarantee but the historic record leads us to believe there is a good chance of it.

 

[ron baker]

?So how much are Samsung rinsing us if they can afford to drop their prices at will.. its good to see wd finally getting their act together wrt SSD's. Will hold back for all the old stock to be flushed out b4 possibly buying....