The Western Digital WD Black SN750 SSD Review: Why Fix What Isn't Broken?
by Billy Tallis on January 18, 2019 8:01 AM ESTAnandTech 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.
The WD Black SN750 is a few percent faster overall than last year's model, allowing it to tie with the Phison E12-based Corsair MP510 on the Light test. But the Samsung 970 EVO and Silicon Motion SM2262EN-based drives are still substantially faster, at least when the test is run on an empty drive.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores for the SN750 are a few microseconds faster than its predecessor, which doesn't change the drive's rankings. The average latency scores are pretty close to the fastest drives, but the 99th percentile latency scores are merely average for this product segment.
The average write latency scores from the SN750 are virtually tied with the fastest drives, and the average read latency scores are imperceptibly slower than the Samsung 970 EVO.
As with average write latency, 99th percentile write latency for the SN750 is basically tied with the fastest drives—every write lands in the SLC cache with minimal delay, even when the test is run on a full drive. The 99th percentile read latencies do not rank as highly, but are still comfortably below 1ms even for the full-drive test run.
As with the Heavy test, the new WD Black leapfrogs the Toshiba XG6 to retake our record for most energy efficient NVMe SSD on the Light test. There's still a bit of catching up to be done before it matches the WD Blue SATA SSD, but it's still quite an accomplishment for the SN750 to use half the energy required by the Samsung 970 EVO.
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iwod - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Patiently waiting for PCI-E 5.0 SSD, that is 16GB/s for 4x.Ryan Smith - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
So for what it's worth, the last time I talked to the PCI-SIG about PCIe 5, they were saying that they were expecting it to be used in conjunction with PCIe 4 rather than replacing it. The idea being that the PCIe x16 slot closest to the CPU would be a PCIe 5 slot, while everything else would be PCIe 4 due to the distances and signal integrity issues involved.If that's still the plan, then I wouldn't expect to see PCIe 5 SSDs, at least not in the M.2 form factor.
iwod - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
Thx. But surely Directly Attached NAND from SSD is more important? It is way more latency sensitive than GPU.I am wondering if we could get sort of like 20x Slot with 16x bandwidth. So 4x for SSD, and 8x * 2 for GPU.Most people are still using a single graphics card, I would be fine with 8x GPU PCI-E 5.0 and 4x for SSD.
Does that mean we might never see Thunderbolt 5 with PCI-E 5 signalling?
GreenReaper - Saturday, January 19, 2019 - link
Basically this is how PCIe 4 is likely to work for many existing AMD motherboards.ScouserPcgamer - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
The Seagate Firecuda wipes the floor of read/write speeds, this is like a 1% improvement over the 2018 modelLogitechFan - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
And then comes 970 Pro and wipes the floor with all of them and spits on their graves.LogitechFan - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
970 Pro is not on the list?! WTF is this, an Intel commercial?!Oxford Guy - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
What is and isn't tested is sometimes very strange here. The Nvidia GTX 960, for example, was never tested."Editor's Note: Due to personal matters we won’t have a GeForce GTX 960 review published today. But in lieu of that we wanted to go over the basics of NVIDIA’s latest Maxwell card"
Today or ever.
"Anyhow, that’s a wrap from us for now. Be sure to check back in early next week for our complete look at GeForce GTX 960, including performance, overclocking, HEVC support, and more."
Still waiting... Those promises were posted in 2015.
Oxford Guy - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
"Conspiracy theorists" claimed the card wasn't tested because it was a turkey, making Nvidia look bad.Has Anandtech staff ever explained why the promised review never materialized?
Ryan Smith - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
"Has Anandtech staff ever explained why the promised review never materialized?"Honestly, we're busy and despite our best efforts, sometimes bite off more than we can chew. Especially as we have imperfect vision about what products may show up on our doorsteps tomorrow.