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

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