Western Digital Blue SSD Review

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JOHNNYLUCKY, Yeah, I told you this 🙂 I saw 2 different retailers with a specified release date as October 26. However the site of one of these retaiers, but in a different country, in Belgium, pointed out a date as October 12. But judging by what Chris said above, it's unlikely that they'll be released in the coming week.
 


Question:
In the typical WD line, the Green drives have been low power, spin down to 'be green' and save energy.
How does that relate to the already low power of an SSD?
 
Back in March 2010, Western Digital introduced the SiliconEdge Blue line. The reviewers said the price was too high, and a few months later the prices had fallen to half their MSRP, making the products competitive with the other offerings on the market. Western Digital discontinued them by the end of the year, and is only now--six years later--attempting to reenter the consumer SSD market.

Maybe Western Digital is serious about the consumer SSD market this time. But they are starting out the same way they did in 2010, putting out a product with unexceptional performance at a premium price. If I were a former Sandisk employee now working for Western Digital, I would be a tad nervous right now.
 
The only SSD that drew attention as a bad product in recent years was the Intel 600p. After our report Intel fixed the issue. We are still testing endurance and what happened when it expires on that product and should be able to report back in around 10 to 15 days.
 




Apparently, this is what they need to replace SATA with along with Intel's Xpoint:

New 'Gen-Z Consortium' Announces Interconnect Technology Optimized For Next-Generation 'Storage Class Memory'

http://genzconsortium.org

; )
 
Anyone complaining about SATA holding back hard drives really needs to read what they said again. Hard drives can't saturate SATA2. Only the fastest hard drives can even saturate SATA1 more than marginally. NVME/U.2/M.2/anything similar can't yet fully replace SATA anywhere that huge volume matters because SSDs can't touch hard drives in GB/$ and even if they could, the PCIe-based connectors don't have cables that allow for very high GB/volume in a case.

You can have dozens of hard drives in a case where you can't get nearly as many other devices. NVME certainly brings performance to levels that SATA (and even SAS) can't compete with, but better performance with these drawbacks is not a replacement, it is an augment, at least for the time being. Mobile computers can mostly get away without SATA, also basic desktops, but support for it shouldn't be dropped completely any time soon.

Also, I should mention that as for complaints about SATA being too slow, even though the difference in theoretical performance can be enormous, PCIe-based storage still generally doesn't help anything except mostly niche storage-intensive workloads.
 
SATA is crap slow no matter how one tries to spin it and all the drawbacks will likely be taken care of within the next few years as it's already under way per the link below. HD's are a 1980's technology and everybody who knows anything about HD's already knows that HD's and SATA have always been a huge bottleneck keeping computers super slow so, you'll get no sympathy from all of us who have been ready to move on for a long time now - NVMe SSD's, U.2, M.2 etc. is what we've been waiting for since like 2010. No point clinging to old obsolete, outdated and super slow technology that is capped at super slow speeds with an ACHI interface that will never ever get beyond 600MB/s. SATA has been a huge bottleneck keeping HD's and storage super slow for years.

Apparently, this is an option to replace SATA with along with Intel's Xpoint:

New 'Gen-Z Consortium' Announces Interconnect Technology Optimized For Next-Generation 'Storage Class Memory'

http://genzconsortium.org

Again, Remember, VGA got pretty cheap too and it took like 10 years to get rid of it. We certainly need SATA for now but, it should start being considered obsolete by 2020 and begin to disappear from motherboards to make more room for more NVMe SSD connections. I just hope SATA doesn't turn into the next VGA and linger for 10 years. No point clinging to old obsolete, outdated and super slow technology that is capped at super slow speeds with an ACHI interface that will never ever get beyond 600MB/s. SATA has been a huge bottleneck keeping HD's and storage super slow for years.

"The SATA 1.5Gb/s bottleneck was quickly exceeded, followed by SATA 3.0Gb/s, and within a year of SATA 6.0Gb/s there were drives that could saturate even that interface. Faster alternatives were needed, but the interface was only part of the problem."

http://www.pcgamer.com/best-nvme-ssds/
Click to expand...

"Starting in October, the DemoEval lab will be hosting clusters for Silicon Valley startups using all NVMe SSDs. A year ago, these were SAS/ SATA clusters so the change is clearly upon us."

https://www.servethehome.com/going-fast-inexpensively-48tb-of-near-sata-pricing-nvme-ssds/
Click to expand...

PCI is next:

NVLINK Unified Virtual Memory (UVM) = 5 to 12 times faster than PCIE 3.0
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-volta-gpus-sc15/
Click to expand...
 
Haed drives hit the market 1956, not the 1980s. Rubber tires were invented in 1845 and it doesn't look like humanity will stop using them any time in the next 100 years.

SATA and rotational drives serve valid purposes in many markets. They aren't going away any time soon either.
 
No point clinging to old obsolete, outdated and super slow technology that is capped at super slow speeds with an ACHI interface that will never ever get beyond 600MB/s. SATA has been a huge bottleneck keeping HD's and storage super slow for years.

"Starting in October, the DemoEval lab will be hosting clusters for Silicon Valley startups using all NVMe SSDs. A year ago, these were SAS/ SATA clusters so the change is clearly upon us."

https://www.servethehome.com/going-fast-inexpensively-48tb-of-near-sata-pricing-nvme-ssds/

PCI is next:

NVLINK Unified Virtual Memory (UVM) = 5 to 12 times faster than PCIE 3.0
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-volta-gpus-sc15/
 


Gen Z is very interesting, but from the outside looking in, it appears that they are focusing using SCM as memory, rather than block based storage, it will certainly be interesting to watch it evolve, it has a lot of disparate support. However, when they briefed me they wouldn't answer even the most basic of questions on the approach, very high level for now. It is really for the datacenter, they are using custom chips to communicate with other servers via Ethernet, so it definitely will not serve well as an in-box solution.
 
1991ATServerTower: "Haed drives hit the market 1956, not the 1980s"

Woo hoo, somebody went to Wikipedia and plucked out the wrong factoid for this case. No, I'm not talking about the ancient first HD's ever created I was talking about the updated 1980's version of HD's made with PC's in mind that led to what we have today but, nice try. Had you read the full article at Wiki you might've understood what I was talking about but you were only interested in quote-mining to suite your own biases here.

Some who attempt to defend the super slow SATA sound like they work for SATA or something as they all seem desperate and live in fear of living without SATA.
 
josejones, you aren't making any sense at all. Whether or not there are interfaces a million times faster than SATA it IS NOT the main bottleneck in the vast majority of use cases, so it isn't slowing things down for the vast majority of users. Just because there are some drives that can move data faster than it (mostly in niche workloads at that) doesn't change the fact that most people not only don't need more performance than SATA 1.5Gb/s offers, but most people can't even see a visible difference in their usage of computers between doing things on a SATA 1.5Gb/s drive internally capable of 1GB/s and the same drive in an NVME interface. That means that while SATA is slower than many other interfaces, calling it slow is misleading because it isn't slowing down the average computer experience.

If I do almost anything on my Arc 100 (250GB) SSD, doing the same things on some 4GB/s NVME SSD won't change much. Sure, it'll copy ISO files in a couple seconds instead of a couple dozen seconds, but that doesn't matter unless I'm moving dozens or more ISO files often, for one example of an already atypically intense use case. Average Jo and Jane watching cat videos on Chrome or even Hardcore Harry playing BF4 won't see the difference between a decent modern SATA SSD and the huge PCIe monsters used in high-performance machines. Just switching from using a modern hard drive to a modern SSD makes about as much of an improvement in computer usability as there is to be had for all but the most intensive workloads.

Yes, for very performance-sensitive workloads, SATA is inadequate and needs replacement, which is why we have things like PCIe interfaces, fiber, and SAS. However, all of these things are currently more expensive (even compared to SATA SSDs, let alone comparing to HDDs) and that isn't likely to change any time soon, nor is the fact that most people don't need the full performance that SATA offers, let alone something better. That means that SATA is likely to stick with us for quite some time and that's not a bad thing.

SATA has never held hard drive performance back. Hard drives aren't fast enough to saturate SATA and by the time hard drives are truly obsolete, they probably still won't be that fast because their capacity increases faster than their performance can (that's a simple area formula).

Hard drives can't go away just because you don't like their performance. They are still by far the cheapest option for mass data storage, so they are necessary. That isn't likely to change in the next ten years, let alone the next four. Therefor there is a reason, a "point", in keeping hard drives and SATA around. If I need terabytes of capacity at a low price, they are the only option and even the expectations of the SSD companies point to this staying true well past 2020.

If anything, the biggest bottlenecks nowadays for most people are internet speeds and the relatively poor coding efficiency in much of modern software, which is part of why significant boosts in storage performance have hugely diminishing returns on perceived performance. Until those are improved, it wouldn't matter if your primary storage was 500GB of SRAM on a 1TB/s bus if you don't have an atypical use case for even the average enthusiast.

None of this is to say I'm against progress, not even progress just for the sake of progress. If we can replace SATA hard drives with something that is strictly better, then I'm all for it. Unfortunately, as of yet and the foreseeable future, we can't meet, let alone beat, the low cost per GB for high storage capacities. As SSDs have gotten closer and closer, we've seen higher and higher market saturation in the lower capacity front, especially the mobile side, but that's not enough. Even if the sub 1TB market gets fully saturated with SSDs, hard drives can't go away until SSDs reach true price parity. Again, that's not expected for much more than the four years you're talking about.
 
Yaaaaaawn, always a smug know-it-all who likes to tell everybody else what they need and what they don't for their own computer - feel free to cling to old obsolete, outdated and super slow technology that is capped at super slow speeds with an ACHI interface that will never ever get beyond 600MB/s. SATA has been a huge bottleneck keeping HD's and storage super slow for years - if that's all you need fine, nobody cares.

"most people not only don't need more performance than SATA 1.5Gb/s offers, but most people can't even see a visible difference in their usage of computers between doing things on a SATA 1.5Gb/s drive internally capable of 1GB/s and the same drive in an NVME interface"

STFU, the facts prove you wrong. What do you work for SATA or something?

Samsung 960 Pro: read 35Gbps write: 21Gbps
http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/consumer/960pro.html

blazorthon "josejones, you aren't making any sense at all"

LOL, you either have no clue what you're talking about or are lying. Highly respected people in the business very, very strongly disagree with you to the point that you'd have to be on a different planet not to already know that fact.

ssd-interface-comparison-v2-en.png


6468_31_defining_nvme_hands_on_testing_with_the_1_6tb_intel_p3700_ssd.png


6468_18_defining_nvme_hands_on_testing_with_the_1_6tb_intel_p3700_ssd.png


"The SATA 1.5Gb/s bottleneck was quickly exceeded, followed by SATA 3.0Gb/s, and within a year of SATA 6.0Gb/s there were drives that could saturate even that interface. Faster alternatives were needed, but the interface was only part of the problem."
http://www.pcgamer.com/best-nvme-ssds/

"Starting in October, the DemoEval lab will be hosting clusters for Silicon Valley startups using all NVMe SSDs. A year ago, these were SAS/ SATA clusters so the change is clearly upon us."
https://www.servethehome.com/going-fast-inexpensively-48tb-of-near-sata-pricing-nvme-ssds/

NVLINK Unified Virtual Memory (UVM) = 5 to 12 times faster than PCIE 3.0
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-volta-gpus-sc15/

blazor, if you want to live in the 1980's go ahead - you'll get no grief from me as i couldn't care less. Myself and most others will move on and could not care less about your opinion.
 
@josejones - ^ think you're missing the point , 50% of PC's currently in peoples homes are still running sata 2, 40% sata 3 , & only 10% actually have the capability to run newer tech - sata ssd's are where the money is.
You have the capability to run the newest stuff - great for you , it'll be out soon enough & at an extortionate price because sales will be so low.

In the meantime the vast majority of PC user's are still running older chipset s & are happy enough with the improvement a standard midrange sata based ssd brings to the table.



 


What you call "super slow" is already faster than can be taken advantage of by most software used by regular users, so again, that there are faster alternatives will not change what the majority of people are using until price parity is a lot closer to being reached. SATA is not bottlenecking most workloads for most people. It defintiely doesn't bottleneck hard drives. Hard drives still can't saturate SATA 3.0 Gb/s and most hard drives either don't saturate SATA 1.5Gb/s or barely saturate it. Flash memory as used in most controllers has very rarely been faster than SATA6.0Gb/s can afford by more than a little (if at all) except in very high queue depths or fully sequential workloads which regular users and even most enthusiasts generally don't reach. Heck, for the most part, only higher-end SSDs can saturate SATA6.0Gb/s even under those conditions. The only TLC drives that can are Samsung's and most lower end MLC drives can't either.


Absolutely none of your pictures prove me wrong. You are posting a mix of theoretical bandwidth and sustained bandwidth pictures. None of these relate directly to perceived application performance. In fact, Tom's specifically states this in most of their SSD articles. Maybe you should read them fully instead of grabbing only what you like from them.


No one in the business, highly respected or otherwise, says that the average person is even capable of benefiting from NVME in the next few years because the average person doesn't do anything where GB/s performance levels actually improve their computing experience. Web browsers won't speed up from GB/s storage performance, office work won't improve, watching movies and TV shows won't improve, the list goes on and on. Only niche applications actually benefit from anything more than a modern SSD and even then, SATA1 and SATA2, while saturated, don't actually bottleneck perceived performance much (if at all) in the vast majority of regular workloads.

One of the biggest improvements of an SSD over an HDD is in boot time. Boot time on SATA2 is just as fast as on SATA3 and NVME doesn't make much of a difference. Even if it did take a 2 second boot time from BIOS to Windows down to .2 seconds, how much has that helped you? Even if it takes a .5 second opening of a folder to a .05 opening, how much has that helped you? Even worse, it doesn't actually improve things that much despite the huge hardware advantage because Windows just doesn't use it that efficiently. If you're running 50 VMs on the same device and boot them all at once, then yeah, you'll see the difference. I don't know about you, but I do know that most people don't do things like that.

Professional workloads are best suited to professional hardware. That is why we see products like PCIe SSDs. Enthusiasts get some trickle-down models, but they are all made with heavy loads in mind. Look at the high queue depths for getting the most out of most of this class of hardware for definitive proof of that.



SATA 1.5Gb/s is only saturated by decent SSDs and the fastest of hard drives. Those "fastest of hard drives" don't saturate SATA 3.0 Gb/s. Only SSDs can. Furthermore, SSDs still don't saturate SATA 3.0Gb/s for most regular workloads. Other than copy/paste of movie files or similar stuff, which is already arbitrarily fast unless you do a huge amount of them at once, there are almost no usage cases for the average user to benefit from NVME-based SSDs. The biggest improvement an SSD brings over a hard drive is not in sequential bandwidth, but in random access speed and multi-tasking, which even cheap modern SSDs can do very well.

Faster alternatives are only needed for highly intensive workloads that even most enthusiasts don't have anything to do with. None of this is even close to being related to the 1980s either. Hard drives from then were orders of magnitude slower than SATA, which wasn't around until the mid 2000s and didn't fully replace PATA/IDE until almost 2010. So no, while you may move on, most others certainly will not.
 
Wow is my mother-in law posting here now? She is the reason I could donate all my encyclopedias since she knows everything.
I thought this was about the WD Blue SSD not the Samsung 960 Pro did I miss the change in topic?
I love this chart thank you for posting it!
Caution entering know-it-all zone JJ! LOL!! Okay, lot of great info I'll take the rest of the week off and read it.

I think the vast majority of users will be happy with SATA3 or SATA 6GB as some call it. I don't think people would be satisfied with SATA 1.5GB if 3.0 is current, just like people wouldn't be satisfied with USB 1.1 after experiencing USB3.0. However once they try a SSD it will open their eyes to the increased performance we are talking about. For SSDs we are reaching speeds that the majority of users will not need and won't pay the premium for.

The WD Blue line which is the SanDisk X400 series repackaged is targeting that majority. The Green line is using a slower Sandisk like the Z410 (I think it was mentioned), which was only moving when the X400s were sold out since the price difference wasn't that much. However WD isn't afraid of selling it's products at premium prices. Where SanDisk priced it's products aggressively to get market share. I don't think the WD versions will be priced that aggressively. If you look at WD hard drives compared to other brands they are never the cheapest, and I don't expect them to be the lowest priced SSD line either.

 
I thought it was a pretty bad idea for SanDisk to sell their company to WD because of obvious priorities. I really miss new products from SanDisk, especially I love their SanDisk ExtremePro SSDs models; bought 100+ as on today. I hope soon we see new SSD Extreme series launch from SanDisk...
 
No more SSD Extreme from SanDisk, since SanDisk was bought and merged in to WD. SanDisk never got the market share that was expected for their resources. WD will probably release a Black version SSD using the highest performing SanDisk SKU. That is a guess since all the SanDisk contacts we had are gone after the WD integration.

Funny thing is they were finally getting some good responses to their X400 line and making progress when WD bought them. Now they no longer exist.
 
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