The past year 2018 was a period of intensive growth for NVMe drives. During this time, many manufacturers have developed and introduced products that have significantly raised the overall level of solutions that work through the PCI Express bus. The linear performance of advanced NVMe SSDs began to approach the bandwidth of the PCI Express 3.0 x4 interface, and the speed during arbitrary operations increased significantly compared to previous generations.
In light of this, it is not surprising that many interesting solutions have come to the market. Breakthrough Intel SSD 760p, WD Black NVMe and ADATA XPG SX8200 consistently became the best consumer drives last year, and they all looked at the level of previous NVMe models as representatives of a completely new generation - the increase in speed characteristics was so serious. A symbol of change was also the fact that for the first time in several years, Samsung lost the title of the supplier of the most interesting mass SSDs: the Samsung 960 EVO drive offered to it over the past year, due to the increased activity of competitors, has become far from the best option. And it seemed that the intensive growth that had begun could no longer be stopped, and in 2019 the active improvement of mass NVMe SSDs would continue.
However, the first months of this year indicate the opposite: it seems that last year's breakthrough manufacturers have wasted all their strength, and the most that we can see in the near future is gradual updates to last year's products. You don't have to go far for examples. Today we're going to take a look at Western Digital's latest NVMe SSD, the WD Black SN750, and it's the third new product this year that hasn't had any major changes to the underlying drive architecture. In the products that we encounter this year, manufacturers do not indulge us with fundamentally new approaches and hardware solutions. Everything is limited either by changing flash memory to its more modern varieties, or in general, exclusively by optimizations at the firmware level.
However, we do not at all want to say that such an approach obviously cannot give good results. Here's a great example: the new Samsung 970 EVO Plus, which differs from its predecessor by replacing the old 64-layer with a more modern 96-layer TLC 3D V-NAND, has unexpectedly set new performance benchmarks for the consumer NVMe SSD market segment.
But this is not always the case and not for everyone. For example, the new version of the ADATA XPG SX8200 drive, which received the ending Pro in the name, received such firmware optimizations that it would be better if they were not there at all. The drive has become faster than its predecessor only in benchmarks, while it does not offer a real improvement in speed performance or other characteristics.
What Western Digital has done, at first glance, looks more like an ADATA approach. The fact is that the WD Black SN750 is an analogue of last year's WD Black NVMe drive (it had model number SN720) with corrected firmware. However, let's not rush to conclusions, who knows how this could affect performance. After all, Western Digital already gave us an unexpected and pleasant surprise once when, after the slow and unremarkable first version of WD Black PCIe, came the second version of WD Black NVMe, which changed everything and became one of the best consumer NVMe SSDs of last year. Therefore, as soon as the third version of the βblackβ Western Digital drive reached Russia, we immediately decided to test it. Let's see, maybe Western Digital managed to surpass Samsung again and make something more interesting than the Samsung 970 EVO Plus?
Technical specifications
For the Black NVMe drive (SN720) released last year, Western Digital has completely updated the hardware platform. The manufacturer approached the development of this SSD with all responsibility: a special proprietary modular controller was even created for it, which, as originally planned, in various variations was to gradually spread its halo of habitation to other NVMe SSDs of the company. The new Black SN750 we're talking about today lives up to its original intent: its key component is inherited from its predecessor. It again uses the same triple-core 28nm controller, created by the SanDisk engineering team that came under the wing of Western Digital.
However, the irremovability of the controller is hardly worth considering as something bad. The SanDisk chip performed quite well in the Black NVMe of 2018, and despite the relatively small number of ARM Cortex-R cores, it provided very decent performance without any problems.
Has not changed compared to the previous version of SSD and flash memory. Then, as now, Western Digital uses proprietary 64-layer BiCS3 memory (TLC 3D NAND) with a 256-gigabit chip size for its flagship product. And this moment, frankly, raises much more questions. The fact is that Western Digital announced trial deliveries of a more advanced 96-layer fourth-generation flash memory (BiSC4) back in the middle of last year. And it would be quite natural if such a memory would appear in the current version of the company's flagship drive. Moreover, Western Digital's manufacturing partner, Toshiba, began shipping drives based on BiCS4 memory back in September last year (the corresponding model is called XG6). However, something went wrong with Western Digital, and the transition to 96-layer flash memory did not take place, as a result of which the new Black SN750 in terms of hardware configuration turned out to be completely similar to the previous version of the "black" flagship.
In defense of its novelty, the manufacturer says that serious changes have been made at the firmware level, and the redesigned software part may well provide a breakthrough in speed performance. However, it is worth recalling here that the SanDisk controller on which Western Digital drives are based is characterized by the hardware implementation of many algorithms for which software approaches are usually used.
And this fact makes us doubt that the performance of the next representative of the Black family can really be radically improved by some kind of firmware optimizations. But, apparently, Western Digital's marketing department does not share our skepticism. The list of features of the new product is compiled as if the Black SN750 is really a noticeably better product compared to the previous Black NVMe. Passport speeds of random reading and writing, as well as performance in small-block reading, according to official data, increased by 3-7%. And the performance for random writes immediately increased by up to 40%, which should mainly ensure the best performance of the new model in real conditions.
If we talk about specific numbers, then the official specifications of the WD Black SN750 have taken the following form.
| Manufacturer | Western Digital | |||
| Π‘Π΅ΡΠΈΡ | WD Black SN750 NVMe SSD | |||
| Model number | WDS250G3X0C | WDS500G3X0C WDS500G3XHC |
WDS100T3X0C WDS100T3XHC |
WDS200T3X0C WDS100T3XHC |
| Form Factor | M.2 2280 | |||
| Interface | PCI Express 3.0 x4 - NVMe 1.3 | |||
| Capacity, GB | 250 | 500 | 1000 | 2000 |
| Configuration | ||||
| Memory chips: type, manufacturing process, manufacturer | SanDisk 64-layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND | |||
| Controller | SanDisk 20-82-007011 | |||
| Buffer: type, volume | DDR4-2400 256 MB |
DDR4-2400 512 MB |
DDR4-2400 1024 MB |
DDR4-2400 2048 MB |
| Performance | ||||
| Max. sustained sequential read speed, MB/s | 3100 | 3470 | 3470 | 3400 |
| Max. sustained sequential write speed, MB/s | 1600 | 2600 | 3000 | 2900 |
| Max. random read speed (blocks of 4 KB), IOPS | 220 000 | 420 000 | 515 000 | 480 000 |
| Max. random write speed (blocks of 4 KB), IOPS | 180 000 | 380 000 | 560 000 | 550 000 |
| physical characteristics | ||||
| Power consumption: idle / read-write, W | 0,1/9,24 | |||
| MTBF (mean time between failures), mln h | 1,75 | |||
| Recording resource, TB | 200 | 300 | 600 | 1200 |
| Overall dimensions: LxHxD, mm | 80 x 22 x 2,38 - no heatsink 80 x 24,2 x 8,1 - with heatsink |
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| Mass, g | 7,5 - without heatsink 33,2 - with a radiator |
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| Warranty period, years | 5 | |||
Given that all the performance improvements come from firmware fixes alone, it's a natural question to ask if the already released 2018 WD Black NVMe will get the same improvement. And unfortunately, the answer is no. Western Digital declined to explicitly explain why the SN750 firmware cannot be applied to the SN720, but we believe that the new firmware brings the controller to a higher clock speed, and to ensure that this does not cause any problems, more stringent chips are applied to the chips for the SN750 during production. requirements for the quality of semiconductor crystals. In fact, a lower-end NVMe solution, the Blue SN500, has recently appeared in Western Digital's portfolio, and thanks to this, the company now has a natural opportunity to differentiate controllers by silicon quality without increasing the reject rate.
Along with an increase in the controller frequency, the reorganization of the principles of SLC caching could also help improve the performance of the Black SN750. If we talk about Black NVMe, then the SLC cache in this drive was nowhere near as effective. The developers used the simplest static scheme, and the amount of flash memory operating in accelerated mode was quite small - only about 3 GB for every 250 GB of SSD capacity. But the new version of the Black SN750, unfortunately, did not receive any significant improvements in this direction. The SLC cache is once again a fixed area of ββa similarly sized flash array. Therefore, all the old claims to the Black SN750 SLC cache remain.
As an illustration, here is a traditional graph that shows how the performance of the updated WD Black SN750 XNUMXTB model looks like with continuous sequential writes.
Indeed, this graph is almost identical to the sequential write speed graph we received for the WD Black NVMe. And this applies not only to the amount of data, after which a decrease in performance is observed, but also to the absolute values ββof the write speed.
But the new WD Black SN750 still offers some serious innovations. For example, now a 2 TB drive version has appeared in the lineup. True, you need to keep in mind that to create it, the manufacturer had to resort to using 512-gigabit chips instead of 256-gigabit ones, and this, as often happens in such situations, did not have the best effect on performance. Even according to the passport specifications, a 2TB drive is slower than a 1TB drive.
The second fundamental innovation is the appearance of a special gaming mode (Gaming Mode) in the SSD, aimed at enthusiasts who want to get the highest possible performance. It disables energy-saving features (Autonomous Power State Transitions) for the drive, which allows you to minimize delays during initial data accesses. The game mode for the Black SN750 is enabled in the proprietary Western Digital SSD Dashboard utility, where the appropriate switch has now been added.
However, you should not think that Gaming Mode is some kind of magical technology that can qualitatively change the situation with performance. Tests show that the increase in performance is almost imperceptible. Small changes for the better are visible only in synthetic benchmarks and only in small-block operations in the absence of a request queue.
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Nevertheless, for desktop systems, we would still recommend activating the initially disabled Gaming Mode. It still provides a performance boost, albeit a small one. At the same time, this mode does not bring any negative effects, in addition to a slight increase in power consumption, which is unlikely to be noticeable in desktop computers.
As for the terms of the warranty and the declared resource, in this respect the WD Black SN750 is completely similar to the previous model. The warranty service period is set to ordinary five years, during which the user is allowed to completely overwrite the drive 600 times. An exception is made only for the younger version with a volume of 250 GB: for it, the resource has been increased to 800 times the SSD overwriting during the service life.
Appearance and internal arrangement
As follows from all the above, the WD Black SN750 is just a minor update of the previous WD Black NVMe with a relatively small list of changes. Therefore, it is not surprising that the old and new versions of the drive are identical in terms of PCB design. Its design has not changed at all, and it will be almost impossible to distinguish a newer model from an old one if you peel off a sticker from it.
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The SSD has a one-sided design that allows it to be used in "low profile" slots. The SanDisk branded controller 20-82-007011 is located in the center of the board, and two flash memory chips are separated along the edges of the M.2 module. This was done on purpose - Western Digital engineers considered that with such a layout, the printed circuit board has a simpler topology, and the issue of heat dissipation is also more efficiently solved.
We tested a 500 GB drive, and the flash memory array on it turned out to be filled with two chips, each of which contained eight 64-layer 256-Gbps 3D TLC NAND chips (BiCS3) manufactured by SanDisk. Therefore, the eight-channel controller in the drive under consideration uses two-fold interleaving of devices in each channel. This is usually enough for the SSD hardware platform to reach its full potential.
A DRAM buffer chip is installed next to the controller, which is necessary for fast work with the address translation table. This is the only component in the WD Black SN750 that the manufacturer buys on the side. In this case, an SK Hynix chip with a capacity of 512 MB was used, and the bet was made on a relatively fast memory - DDR4-2400.
However, there is nothing new in all this, we saw the same thing when we got acquainted with the WD Black NVMe. But Western Digital tried to compensate for the lack of changes in the hardware configuration with at least some changes in the exterior. For the WD Black SN750, a gaming image was chosen, and it is emphasized in all available ways: first of all, by the design of the packaging and, secondly, by the way the information sticker on the SSD looks like.
The box for the WD Black SN750 is made in black, which replaced the blue and white design, the design actively uses a monospaced font, and the name of the drive is now written as WD_BLACK.
The sticker on the drive is also designed in a similar style, but not without flaws. However, she can be forgiven for this, because the manufacturer had to have a lot of service information, logos and barcodes on it.
Since the Black SN750 is clearly aimed at enthusiasts, it would be logical if the sticker would be made on a foil basis, which some manufacturers resort to to improve heat dissipation from the chips on the SSD board. But the Western Digital developers decided to take a more radical approach to the issue of cooling, and for those who are seriously concerned about the issue of cooling, they made a separate modification of the Black SN750 with a full-fledged heatsink.
This version is a separate product that costs $20-$35 more. However, Western Digital believes that there is definitely something to pay for here. After all, the applied heatsink is not a simple inefficient heat-dissipating cap, which, for example, third-tier companies like to put on their NVMe SSDs. In Black SN750, it is a fairly massive black aluminum bar, the shape of which was worked on by masters of their craft - invited experts from EKWB.
Software
Western Digital drives always come with the same proprietary SSD Dashboard service utility, which implements all the basic functions for their maintenance. But by the release of the new version of the flagship NVMe SSD, it has noticeably changed: it has a new dark version of the interface, which automatically turns on if the utility detects a gaming Black SN750 in the system.
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At the same time, the capabilities of the utility remain almost completely the same, and it is unlikely to surprise anyone. In fact, only the Gaming Mode switch is added to the usual set of functions. But this does not mean at all that we are dissatisfied with something: there are no complaints about the SSD Dashboard program, because it remains one of the most full-featured utility utilities of its kind.
The main features of the SSD Dashboard: obtaining information about the SSD installed in the system, including data on the remaining resource and the current temperature regime; drive performance monitoring in real time; updating the firmware via the Internet or from a file; performing the Secure Erase operation and deleting any data from the flash memory by forcefully resetting it; running SMART tests and viewing SMART attributes.
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It is worth noting that the ability to interpret the SMART parameters embedded in the SSD Dashboard is somewhat richer than the information that can be obtained from independent third-party programs.
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But the proprietary NVMe driver for the WD Black SN750 is not provided. Therefore, you will have to work with it through a standard operating system driver, in the properties of which, in order to increase performance and performance in common benchmarks, it is recommended to check the box next to the option βDisable clearing the Windows write cache buffer for this deviceβ.
Source: 3dnews.ru