WD Black NVMe SSD Review: Affordable With Great Write Speeds
WD Black NVMe SSD: The Verdict
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.
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.
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