Discussion WD Black SN7100 SSD review

[mikeymikec]

WD Black SN7100 2 TB Review - The New Best SSD

The WD Black SN7100 2 TB SSD sets a new standard as the fastest Gen 4 SSD we've ever tested. It's also priced well and highly energy-efficient, which helps keep temperatures down. Fast, efficient, and affordable—the WD Black SN7100 hits all the marks.

www.techpowerup.com

WD's selection has puzzled me for some time because every time I've considered them as an alternative to my usual options, I've found them to be almost exclusively DRAM-less drives (the SN850X is an exception I believe), so therefore I basically rule them out as boot drives straight away.

The SN7100 is being heralded as the best current PCIe gen4 SSD and certainly in this review it seems to do pretty well, but I can't help but think that if their tests fail to show its shortcomings as a DRAM-less drive then their tests must be at fault... and I am happy to be corrected btw! It's just that in my experience, DRAM-less drives tend to cause performance problems like one I posted about a few years ago but can't find currently: I was transferring about 150GB data to a new Lenovo laptop with a DRAM-less drive, and not only did the transfer rate drop from decent speeds to like 30MB/sec (obviously the 'slc cache' running out, and how much the drop is depends on the cell tech / controller) but also Windows responsiveness went completely to pot, e.g. waiting 10-15 seconds for the Settings app to open rather than three at the very most.

 

[Shmee]

I am kinda surprised WD's own SN850X isn't included or mentioned in the review, at least from what I saw. It would be good to compare the fairly similar WD black drives.

 

[BoomerD]

I am kinda surprised WD's own SN850X isn't included or mentioned in the review, at least from what I saw. It would be good to compare the fairly similar WD black drives.

The SN850 is mentioned in the various tests...as is the SN770 which I'm running. One thing that kind of surprises me is that they're not exactly comparing apples and oranges...2TB drive for the SN7100, 1TB drive for many of the others being tested.
I'm not "geek" enough to know exactly why that matters...but I believe it does.

 

[mikeymikec]

The SN850 is mentioned in the various tests...as is the SN770 which I'm running. One thing that kind of surprises me is that they're not exactly comparing apples and oranges...2TB drive for the SN7100, 1TB drive for many of the others being tested.
I'm not "geek" enough to know exactly why that matters...but I believe it does.

I think you're correct in that it *can* matter, but it wouldn't surprise me if any comprehensive explanation comes down to a per-series basis, factoring in controller quirks, NAND flash chip capacities and the number of flash chips per model in that series. A bit like RAM controllers and "do 4 modules work better than 2?" questions are answered on a per-cpu-architecture basis.

As I'm very rarely (if ever) interested in pushing every last bit of performance out of a SSD in a real-world scenario, my perspective is that it matters very little to me, but where others here have said "don't get the 128GB model as the 256GB model performs better", in my experience there's no real-world difference. In real-world scenarios, I'm not sure I've ever seen a premium SATA SSD pushing more than 400MB/sec, or say a quality NVMe drive push more than 1.2GB/sec. Benchmarks make big bars on graphs go to >3GB/sec, big whoop.