Review: WD Black NVMe SSD (1TB)

by Tarinder Sandhu on 25 April 2018, 12:00

Tags: WD (NYSE:WDC)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qadsxb

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Test Methodology

HEXUS SSD Test Bench

Hardware Components Product Page
Processor Intel Core i7-8700K (overclocked to 4.8GHz) intel.com
Motherboard Asus ROG Maximus X Hero asus.com
Graphics Card MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio msi.com
Memory G.Skill Trident Z 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4-3200 gskill.com
Power Supply be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 1,000W bequiet.com
Primary Storage 256GB WD Black PCIe SSD wdc.com
Secondary Storage 1TB Crucial MX300 SATA SSD crucial.com
Chassis be quiet! Dark Base 700 bequiet.com
Monitor iiyama ProLite X4071UHSU-B1 iiyama.com
Operating system Windows 10 Pro microsoft.com

Comparison Drive Configurations

  Total Capacity Controller Firmware Interface
WD Black NVMe 1,000GB WD 101020WD PCIe x4
WD Black PCIe 256GB Marvell B35500WD PCIe x4
Crucial MX300 1,050GB Marvell M0CR060 SATA 6Gbps

Benchmarks

CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark provides various storage benchmarks, but we're interested in the returned 32-thread 4K performance numbers to see how well the drives fare when tasked with numerous small transfers.
AS SSD AS SSD measures performance against a trio of popular applications.
PCMark 8 PCMark 8's storage test is a collection of workloads that isolate the performance of the PC's storage system.
Iometer The hardest test we do, hitting the drive(s) with a mixed workload using differing number of users.

Notes

We are benchmarking a-new as we move SSDs on to the latest platform. This is why you will see only a trio of drives in the graphs. The purpose is to show you the benefits, if any, of moving from a good SATA-based SSD (Crucial MX300), to a first-gen PCIe NVME (WD Black), through to today's drive, the WD Black NVMe. Of course, price-per-GB goes up as we move to the fastest drives, but the following graphs ought to illuminate whether it is realy worth spending more cash.