WD Blue And SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD Review: Fast, Affordable Solid State Storage

Name: WD Blue SSD
Brand: WD

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, September 06, 2017, 12:15 PM EDT

WD Blue And SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD - Test Setup, IOMeter, Compression

Page 2: WD Blue And SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD - Test Setup, IOMeter, Compression

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and AHCI (or RAID) mode was enabled.

The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing, and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with our ATTO, PCMark, SANDRA, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System

Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

Processor -

Motherboard -

Video Card -

Memory -

Audio -

Storage -

Intel Core i7-7700K

Asus Z270 Deluxe
(Z270 Chipset, AHCI Enabled)

Intel HD 620

16GB Corsair DDR4-2666

Integrated on board

Corsair Force GT (OS Drive)
Intel SSD 545s
Samsung SSD 850 EVO
OCZ Trion 150
Crucial BX300
WD Blue 3D
SanDisk Ultra 3D

OS -

Chipset Drivers -

DirectX -

Video Drivers -

Benchmarks -

Windows 10 Pro x64

Intel 10.1.19, iRST 14.5.0.1081

DirectX 12

Intel HD 15.40.3.4248

IOMeter 1.1.0 RC
HD Tune v5.60
ATTO v3.05
AS SSD
CrystalDiskMark v3.0.3 x64
PCMark 7
SiSoftware Sandra

IOMeter

I/O Subsystem Measurement Tool

As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance. In other words, the access patterns we tested here may or may not reflect your particular workload. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput within a given storage solution. In addition there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools available currently.

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; our custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (34% writes) and 100% random access.

We're including numbers from both the WD Blue and SanDisk Ultra 3D in our charts, but as you'll see, the two perform identically throughout this review. With the IOMeter access patterns we used, the drives performed somewhat better than the OCZ Trion, but trailed the Samsung and Intel drives.

In terms of max transfer rates with IOMeter, the drives performed a touch below the competition. We should note, however, that these numbers are recorded at the highest queue depth, where performance dipped on the WD and SanDisk drives. The lower queue depths are more important for typical desktop workloads, though.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark

Bring Your Translator: http://bit.ly/aRx11n

Next up we ran the Compression Benchmark built-into AS SSD, an SSD specific benchmark being developed by Alex Intelligent Software. This test is interesting because it uses a mix of compressible and non-compressible data and outputs both Read and Write throughput of the drive. We only graphed a small fraction of the data (1% compressible, 50% compressible, and 100% compressible), but the trend is representative of the benchmark’s complete results.

The compressibility of the data being transferred on the drives has absolutely no impact on performance. Here, the WD Blue and SanDisk Ultra 3D offered smooth, consistent performance, about in the middle of the pack.