WD Black NVMe SSD Review: Affordable With Great Write Speeds

Name: WD Black NVMe Solid State Drive
Brand: WD

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, May 11, 2018, 12:15 PM EDT

Performance Summary: The WD Black NVMe SSD proved to be a strong performer overall, disregarding a couple of inconsistencies like we saw in the HD Tune tests. Read speeds are competitive with some of the fastest NVMe-based SSDs on the market, writes however, are some of the best we’ve seen – in a couple of the sequential write workloads, nothing could touch the WD Black NVMe SSD. In all but one test (again, HD Tune), the WD Black also offered excellent latency characteristics and in the trace-based tests, the drive trails only much more expensive drives featuring MLC NAND or 3D XPoint memory technology.

WD Black NVMe SSD - Find Them At Amazon

The WD Black NVMe SSD hits a number of high notes. Sequential transfers are strong, especially in terms of writes, and latency and endurance are good. The drives also carry a healthy 5-year warranty. We saw some inconsistencies with performance and low queue depth 4K transfers are ho-hum, but we suspect WD will be able to further optimize this drive with future firmware updates as it gets more familiar with the new controller at its heart. Pricing is also fairly competitive, though we suspect there may be some movement in the not too distant future. The 1TB drive featured here is available for about $449, which works out to approximately $.043 per gig. That’s competitive with most other mainstream NVMe-based drives and much more affordable than drives like the Samsung 970 Pro or Intel Optane. Samsung, however, recently dropped pricing on the 970 EVO, which is in the same class as the WD Black. The 1TB 970 EVO can he had for only $399 at the moment, which is very aggressive for an NVMe drive of this class. If fast writes and sequential transfers are important to your use case, however, the WD Black NVMe SSD will be quite appealing.


Strong Writes Good Endurance Competitive Pricing 5 Year Warranty	Middling Reads Some Performance Inconsistencies

Tags: Western Digital, SSD, Storage, WD, nvme, nasdaq: wdc, wd black

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com