Al is hard at work benchmarking the new Western Digital SSDs and you should expect to see his full in depth review in the near future but for those who need immediate gratification here is Hardware Canucks review. The 1TB WD Blue uses a Marvell 1074 controller, a full gigabyte of cache provided by a pair of Micron 512MB DDR3 chips and 15nm TLC that should survive 400TB of writes and is warrantied for three years. Western Digital and SanDisk DNA meet for the first time in a consumer SSD, check out how it fares against the competition right here.
"Western Digital, once known for their hard drives alone, is now wading in the SSD market with two new series. In this review, we take the new Blue 1TB SSD out for a spin."
Here are some more Storage reviews from around the web:
- Toshiba OCZ VX500 SSD @ OCC
- ICY DOCK Black Vortex Quad-Bay USB 3.0 & eSATA External 3.5" SATA HDD Enclosure Review @ NikKTech
- Asustor AS6204T 4-bay NAS @ Kitguru
- Kingston Action Camera microSD @ Benchmark Reviews
- iStorage datAshur PRO 8GB Secure Flash Drive @ Kitguru
Thanks, Jeremy, As always,
Thanks, Jeremy, As always, I’ll look forward to Allyn’s expert measurements. Without meaning to offend anyone, and with hopes that all readers won’t think I’m kicking a dead horse (so to speak), what literally JUMPED OFF THE PAGE for me was the 1GB DDR3 cache: 2 DDR3 @ 512MB. Without knowing (or caring) if that pair run in dual-channel mode, allow me to do my parametric thing again and guess:
DDR3-1600 ==> 12,800 MB/second raw bandwidth (1600 x 8)
SATA-III ==> 600 MB/second MAX HEADROOM (our pal)
I don’t honestly understand why so many Internet Forum users are claiming that “SATA is dead”, when a major storage manufacturer just released a 2.5″ device with 1GB of DDR3 cache. I know I’m dating myself, but I do clearly remember paying $2,500 for a 1.0 GB HDD way back circa 1992.
Even if I’m speaking only for myself, how hard would it truly be to increase the SATA-IV clock rate to 12G, just like modern SAS?
Even better, how about JEDEC-style options with pre-set clock speeds in all the popular flavors: 6G, 8G, 12G and 16G sooner than later (to sync with PCIe 4.0, coming soon to a theater near us).
The SATA-III clock has been “flat-lined” for far too long.
We have fast DRAM to the left us.
We have fast DRAM to the right of us.
In the middle is a horribly slow bottleneck
that’s become a plague to progress worldwide.
(my 2 cents)
Thus, let’s use my favorite
Thus, let’s use my favorite “parametric analysis” to predict the performance of a 4-member RAID-0 array, using the 1TB version of this new WDC SSD:.
Remember, at the start, that 4 x 1GB caches
effectively equal 4GB of DDR3 cache in RAID-0 mode
(this may be hotly debated: I am making all
relevant assumptions explicit here).
WDC says max READ speed is 545 MB/second.
545 / 600 = .9083 aggregate controller efficiency
4 @ 545 = 2,180 MB/second (perfect scaling)
double that with a 12G clock: 2,180 x 2 = 4,360 MB/s
Let’s add another 10% to the aggregate overhead,
because scaling is never perfect:
aggregate overhead increases from 10% to 20%
and clock speed increases from 6G to 12G (i.e. 2x):
600 MBps x 4 members x 2 x .80 = 3,840 MB/second
Conclusion: we predict a READ speed of 3,840 MB/second
with a RAID-0 array of four of these 1TB WDC SSDs,
assuming 80% efficiency and a clock speed of 12 GHz.
Even if that estimate was too conservative, most
SATA ports are downstream of the Z170’s DMI 3.0 link,
which tops out at 3,938.46 MB/second anyway. Therefore,
3,840 MB/second should be a very reliable prediction.