Western Digital WD Black 3D NAND SSD Review

It's both, depending on the segment. The vast majority of SSD controllers can easily saturate the SATA bus, so there's not really much room for differentiation in 2.5"/M.2 SATA drives. But when you've got a PCIe-3 x4 bus to work with, as is the case for the NVMe drives being compared in this article, it's a whole different ball game. There the bottleneck is the controller (and to a much lesser extent, the flash itself). For a while Samsung was really the only game in town, as far as high-end performance goes, but it seems like WD has finally got a worthy competitor. Now it just remains to be seen how well the drives hold up (bad controller firmware can put up high performance numbers at the expense of the longevity of the flash (aka your data)).

It has stabilized into a modest margin business for the few big companies that dominate it. Very similar to how the HDD market did. Based on the margins Western Digital has been seeing lately, I'd say it's even more lucrative.

Western Digital almost has 20% operating income margins at this point, that's a notch below where Intel is typically at (25%-30%) and comparable to Cisco. Their latest two quarters saw them generate $1.85 billion in operating income on $10.5 billion in sales. Not bad.

The NAND industry went into a severe shortage (as NAND goes) along with DRAM. However, NAND shortage happened due to 2D to 3D. While 3D allows for high cell density, it also made Capex go from about 8B to around 25B as an industry. One of the reason Lam stock price has been on a tear. NAND spot pricing went up somewhere between 200-300% for like on like technology. Margins exploded, and the industry grew larger than any forecasts. There is a big debate on if the margins will stay high. While DRAM is still edging up, we may have seen some lowering of NAND pricing. So cost reduction is coming from mixing to MLC and TLC with better architectures in the same package.

Not to mention that Sandisk’s reliability and firmware was (is) a great measure better than Samsung’s - which has more than its share of problems and scandals.

Personally, I now prefer to do crypto using FOSS software, even if it means a CPU performance hit. Who knows which crypto library is being used with hardware? I had certainly never heard of Infineon's RSALib before CVE-2017-15361 caused me to have to revoke one of my RSA keys that was generated on a Yubikey.

So you run without OS level FDE and trust a drive level crypto function? How does key management work, do you input the AES key at a firmware prompt on boot / wake from sleep, or is there transparent OS support for this?

One annoying thing is that Samsung NVMe drives do not support the things that would allow Microsoft Bitlocker to use the drive's hardware encryption and just manage the keys.

It's quite surprising if WD does not have the build-in encryption(). Typically the secure erase on the drives is using this. For example on Samsung the data is always encrypted and doing a secure erase means just generating new encryption key and removing the old one. On SSD this is pretty crucial, because you can't wipe the contents by just writing random stuff on drive. The drive is managing the writes (wear leveling algorithms) and might not actually overwrite existing data.

() Of course it is be possible that they have this internally, but just don't expose the password part to user. Could not see anything on the specs on quick search.

SSDs are trouncing hard drives in capacity, though. AFAIK, they currently top out at 30TB in the 2.5in form factor and 100TB in the 3.5in form factor. (I'm not sure what the current top end is for other form factors but they're probably remarkably high, too.) Of course, prices for these units are also way up there.

> Amazing that in 2018 it's still more expensive to get data storage on a dumb grid of NAND gates built out of common materials than it is to get it on hard drives infused with helium, sporting a high precision high speed motor, platters coated with rare materials, neodymium magnets, and, coming soon, lasers!

And the heads, those are incredibly tiny works of art.

whua? lasers? on rust? what for? (bad guess) thermal bulk erasure?

edit: found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat-assisted_magnetic_recordi...

All those things are still easier/cheaper in CapEx than new lithographic process nodes.

Which has always been true: ever since the discovery of semiconductors, nothing in tech has ever been more capital-intensive than the R&D and working-up of a new fab that can put out smaller-nanometer—or in this case, many-more-layered—circuits.

It's just that now, process nodes are something that apply to storage, too.

Never forget the IBM/Hitachi Deathstar

Fromn the early 2000s until they left the HDD market, Samsung (then still a bit of an underdog) drives were among the best: most quiet, no performance degradation over time (others had that), high reliability. I had a few of them.

I miss the days when you could tell a hard drive brand by the noises it made. Micropolis always had the most musical drives.

Interesting, if you check the leadership at WD, virtually all of them came from HGST. (President, CFO, COO, etc.) This was a case where the acquiring company became the acquired, and they moved their headquarters from SoCal to NorCal, the ultimate signal of who won the internal war. Once they bought SanDisk, a lot of the SanDisk people moved to Micron. Finally, some key notable players from WD moved to Seagate. The industry has been musical chairs.

Does this mean that the "WD Data Center" marque will be the indication, going forward, that a drive has the reliability ratings that Backblaze et al regularly see out of currently-HGST-branded drives?

This review durability rating was 0.3 writes a day for 5 years. Hopefully they mean rewrite entire drive every 3 days.

Mostly MX100's of varying sizes. The one that's currently doing sector corruption is a MX300 750GB, and the "Too good to be true" new price on Amazon (in a sale) should've been a warning.

Ah ok that makes a lot more sense (and it is indeed more than enough). Thanks!

The difference between this drive and Optane isn't huge. It is faster on a lot of benchmarks, competitive on others, and only is behind on two latency tests.

The recent 700 series drive from Intel—the 760p—is pretty good in terms of power consumption. The older 750 was, like the Optane 900P, a large power-hungry card based on their enterprise SSDs and never intended to be used in mobile systems. Intel has on many occasions re-purposed their enterprise SSD tech to make a premium SSD for the consumer market, but that strategy has some downsides.