WD Black NVMe SSD
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 ก.ย. 2024
- WD Black NVMe SSD review, including an explanation of what NVMe is, fitting the drive, and comparative performance tests. Note that the SSD featured was provided by Western Digital, but that this is not a sponsored video.
#wdblack #nvme #explainingcomputers #ssd
You can learn more about the WD Black NVMe SSD at:
www.wdc.com/en... (UK) or
www.wdc.com/pr... (US).
You can purchase the drive on Amazon.com here (affiliate link): amzn.to/2NTpXzq
CrystalDiskMark can be obtained from: crystalmark.in... (be sure to download the DiskMark and not the DiskInfo program).
And a trial of the SoftPerfect RAM disk is at: www.softperfec...
The i7 PC build videos I mentioned are here:
Part One: • i7 PC Build: Part One
Part Two: • i7 PC Build: Part Two
You may also like my recent book “Digital Genesis: The Future of Computing, Robots and AI”, which includes a history of computing: amzn.to/2C2WrA6
More videos on computing and related topics can be found at: / explainingcomputers
And I have another TH-cam channel called ExplainingTheFuture at: / explainingthefuture
The first computer I ever bought, back in 1989, had two 80MB SCSI hard-drives. They were about $1,000 each. In 1989 money.
This drive could transfer the entire contents of both of those drives combined in 0.0235 seconds. And, adjusting for inflation, it costs less than one twentieth as much. And stores over three thousand times more data!
Ain't technology grand! Wow! What an amazing piece of hardware this is!!
Love the calculations!
kryder's law > moore's law
Technology marches on!
turtle to a bullet train ? :D
Speaking of Apples...my first computer was an Apple32e (32K) and I upgraded the memory to 64K...and played Frogger till the cows came home...
When I build my next PC in 2023 as a retirement project, I'll be getting one of these to put the OS on it.
I've had the 1TB model in my system as the boot drive for the past year. It's great. I got a second just recently to the PC I'm building my son for Xmas. By 2023, you might have PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 options. It should serve you well.
I'mma wait and see this one, chief
I think there'll be faster technologies in 2023 than this. Just a guess though
With the current prices and the shortage of PC components, I might have to put off my build to 2023.
Less than 2 years away
I don't think your methodology was necessarily wrong for the read vs. write test. SSDs and especially NVMe SSDs are better at writing than at reading. This is because the flash translation layer inside the SSD that maps the logical sectors to actual flash sectors uses a log filesystem or essentially a type of linked list. This makes writes of new data a simple append operation requiring little work. Reading is more complex in that the device has to read from various tables and scan lists of sectors to decide which ones have the data for the given file (or rather logical sectors). This inevitably requires more CPU and memory within the SSD so ends up being a little slower.
Also, when writing the SSD can let the main system know that it has accepted data even though it is still being cached in RAM on the SSD. IT can do this because the SSD has a set of bulk capacitors that will allow it to continue to run in the case of an unexpected power off and allow the data to be written to Flash. When you have a small number of concurrent writes this can make writing seem an awful lot faster.
Obviously this is a great over-simplification but hopefully explains the test results somewhat.
Very useful post, thanks for sharing. :)
When the entire copy process takes 2 and a half seconds, any lag introduced is significant from the OS doing things like starting processes, allocating RAM or preparing a cache, building the copy dialog box, tending to other threads....
The results are likely to be a little bit different with transfers that take longer. Although you could fill the entire drive in around 2 minutes, if it can keep up those speeds. (Probably not from a RAM disk though! :-D)
Holy crap too lazy to read ur comment
I have been watching your videos for around a year now. I have learned so much from them. Thank you and keep up the good work!
Dude, your storage videos are my absolute favorite! This video definitely did not disappoint. Great work!
Thanks! :)
7 dislikes, from viewers currently storing their data on punched paper tape.
Actually, storing data on tapes is a real thing. Look up tape drive, some people still use it because it is incredibly reliable (and expensive).
Tape made from paper, with punched holes in it, though?
For long term data storage/archiving it's common to use magnetic tape reels, not punch cards. Google for one does this.
Some regular users use magnetic tapes too. For example Jeremy from PCPerspective. They like the reliability of it.
Fortunately punch cards haven't been used for many decades. I don't know exactly how much data you could store on it but kilobytes would be a lot for punch-cards. Also I wouldn't like a computer which is about as large as my living room and which has an extremely high power consumption. Those computes used vacuum tubes instead of transistors, ExplainingComputers showed one of those old computers, if you search for ENIAC then you can read a lot of interesting information about it. In short: those computers were mainly developed for the armies to do a lot of calculations.
"punched paper tape".
Luxury.
I'm still using IP over Avian Carriers (RFC 1149)
FYI/trivia: the WD Raptor and VelociRaptor drives were basically WD's attempt to take enterprise-grade storage and sell it to enthusiast consumers. The Raptor series were full 3.5" drives with 3.5" platters spinning at 10K RPM - basically the same as a SAS or SCSI 10K hard drive but with a SATA controller slapped on so it can be used in a "standard" PC.
The VelociRaptors on the other hand were actually 2.5" 10K hard drives. In the server market, 2.5" drives typically are 15mm thick, whereas consumer laptop 2.5" drives top out around 9.5mm (and today are as thin as 5mm). WD took the 2.5" 15mm enterprise drives, again added a SATA controller, then mounted it on a 2.5" to 3.5" converter made out of a heatsink, known as the "Ice Pack". This was to address the fact that the 10K enterprise drives generate more heat, but would now be used in consumer PCs which may not have the same airflow and cooling characteristics as a loud rackmount server. (You could easily remove the 2.5" drive from the heatsink, although you had to break a warranty sticker, and use the drive in a laptop if that laptop supported 15mm thick drives - but this was almost asking for overheating!)
The 3.5" Raptors like the one you showed actually only existed in 36, 72 and 150GB variants (and there was a special 150GB Raptor X that had a transparent cover so you can see the drive mechanism working!). The VelociRaptor series was available in many more capacities: 80, 150, 160, 250. 300, 450, 500, 600, and 1000GB. (WD also sold VelociRaptors without the heatsink/adapter for direct use in server environments as a cheaper, SATA alternative to more expensive SAS drives.)
Thanks for this. I have every model of the 3.5 inch Raptor around somewhere, aside from the one with the window. And several of the 2.5 inch "sled mounted" drives. Great tech with a lot of metal!
I have a couple of Raptors laying around. Windows has gotten so bloated, I can not even fit an OS on them any more.
@@tonkatoytruck Try Linux. I can usually fit everything I need into a 20GB root filesystem with separate ~15GB /home
I know this is from 2018 but wait! RAMDISK!??? I've never seen any other reviewer do this. This is an amazing concept and a clear apples to apples read/write comparison with no bottlenecks. how is that even the most famous reviewers in 2020 struggle to review drives without a tool like this? You just blew my mind. Congrats to the video and methodology!
Thanks for this. With a drive of this speed, a RAM Disk seems a very sensible way to test. :)
@@ExplainingComputers just one more thing. Do you clean the ram before each testing?
@@rafaelparedes1937 RAMdisk takes ram space, makes it appear that RAM full for OS
I worked on this product implementing the NVME standard before leaving the company. Our original demo (pre-NVME) was to play all 10 seasons of Stargate SG1 (every episode) at the same time on a great big wall of video screens from a single PCIe device. It was back in 2009/2010. We still only were at about 50% capacity. We actually struggled to find a compelling demo back then that would actually tax the drive. Fun times developing hardware and software.
Great to hear this. Thanks for sharing your experience here. Love the Stargate SG1 thing! :)
Hey shinigami lee..... I have a question....can M.2 sata interface support nvme ssd M.2?
There is no words for the speed transition from the computers we had to now... The only problem is there is no time left for a sip of tea or coffee lol. Great Job.
So true. All those little gaps in our day to take a breather are being eroded by new tech . . .
yeah in the old days you turned on your computer then went and made you a coffee
I subscribed because you don't do advertising and you don't yell or have any loud annoying and distracting music. Your English is understandable, and that is not always the case with British folks.
Thanks for the sub. And you are right -- no sponsored messages, yelling or background music here! :)
Thanks again. 2 years later and I’m just now getting ready to install one in my tower. Cheers
Good luck! :)
I built my PC with the 256gb version of that NVMe drive just over 6 months ago as the boot drive, and so far its been excellent...still super quick to boot and load programs ....Damn I remember when sas drives were the fastest thing around, I remember saying to a friend you'll never beat my raid sas drives ....then he bought an SSD...took me all of 2 mins to decide to get one as well....I wonder whats coming next ????
Really like your simple no BS approach to hardware reviews.
I've used WD Black HDDs for over a decade, never a problem experienced, this is a fine line of WD products. So far I've read great review of the WD Black SSD line and look foward to trying one out. Thanks for the excellent video.
I was literally in the middle of explaining m.2 tech to a friend piecing out a new build when I got the notification for this video. Checkmate. I told him there's no point in upgrading anything if you're sticking with the SATA platform. Thanks for this!
Excellent explanation of how technology has changed. I remember in 1984 buying a 20 MB 5 1/4" hard drive, note, 20 MB, not GB, and it cost £500 + VAT! It was installed in a Ferranti Luggable computer which was about the size of a small suitcase.
I am thankful for your quick explanation of NVMe. Like some other individuals, I am slowly catching up with newer storage technologies and your video has helped better understand the newer storage options. Thanks again for the wonderful work you do on TH-cam.
Thanks. I thought that including the explanation near the start was important.
Just be careful when shopping for M.2 SSDs. Some motherboards have M.2 slots that are only SATA. Some have a pair of M.2 where only one is NVMe. Sometimes I see a great price and get excited only to see the M.2 SSD I'm looking at is only SATA and not an NVMe drive. Sometimes it's easy to miss. Be sure to match everything up.
brilliant video again, showing just how far computing has come over the years, somethings you just don't notice and some utterly amaze you for me it was switching to SSD from hard drives from waiting 1.5 minutes to around 6 seconds on startup that is still something that makes me smile to this day , its almost as good as waking up realising its Sunday which means another great video will arrive shortly from you
WD has always been great for me. I literally ,to this day ,still have a 120 gig WD Caviar drive that has been in near continuous use since the start of 2003 when it was purchased. Yes its data is backed up ,but I love to marvel just how much this drive has been through and it still keeps going.
Sadly ,or amazingly ,its run may end next computer upgrade not due to drive failure ,but due to technology out pacing.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I used to have two Velociraptors in RAID 0. I was always the first to be ready to play in online games. They were amazing for the time. I just upgraded to a Samsung 970 EVO from an 860 EVO and even that jump is unbelievable. Great video. Thanks!
Incredible how fast these are! Great video!
Dude you are the best!! I love how in depth all of your guides are, as well as the information you provide. Channel is a goldmine
Thanks.
Sunday with explaining computers.informative video as always sir.👍
ExplainingComputers : WOW !!! The incredible difference for test results of the WD Black NVMe SSD ( Read [MB/s] Write [MB/s] and the Transcend x400 SATA ( Read [MB/s] Write [MB/s] ) shown on your chart is mind boggling indeed ! Great learning video once again , Thanks Scarboro !
Gosh...! This makes me feel like Methuselah. I remember the pride a local company felt when I installed the (then) largest hard drive in our county into their Novell server. It was a whopping 80meg SCSI and took up two device bays. My how quickly the times have changed. Most of the skills that made me valuable are now either obsolete (like knowing the appropriate pin-out for a null modem or even simple serial cables) or done by everyone, including preteens....
I think experience won in the older days of computing still very much matters . . .
I bought one of these drives today. The price now is about half of what it was when you made this video! Thanks for the review!
yeah i know it, i feel like getting the 500GB it's $107.00 W/ Heat Sink $129.00 Nice HS at that on Amazon. And that's what i paid a while back for my WD/Black 250GB, Prices are ok at the moment.
It is amazing how prices in IT keep falling for the same specs.
Chris, thanks for putting out this video, I am a bit behind on the technology so this was a huge help in understanding. My how things have changed. The thing that impresses me the most beyond the speed is the idea that the number 1 bottleneck in most systems can be vastly improved, this comes with a price however as Wind 10 is the only system to handle this and you have to be able to have the hardware to handle it.
Thank you again my friend!
Rich
Thanks Rich. Note the comment below about this working fine in somebody's Linux Mint system . . . :)
Indeed, put a SSD in and old computer, reinstall Windows (or install Linux) and the computer is fine again! It is unbelievable how many people throw away perfectly fine computers because of their slow hard drive and Windows which can't handle a lot of installed and uninstalled software without getting slower. Don't get me wrong, a faster CPU, faster RAM, a better graphics card...it all helps but the storage medium is indeed a big bottleneck.
Good time to make some money doing this process and reselling computers.
Rich
Something which I forgot to mention, NVMe works in any Linux system, there is nothing special about that. It is the same thing as a SATA SSD but with a much higher bandwidth because it is directly connected to a PCIe-slot instead of having to go to the CPU via the PCIe-lane via the SATA-controller.
I got one of those WD Black nvme m.2, using it right now as my boot OS and its working a lot better than expected. Blows my SSDout of the water.
I recently installed an SSD on my laptop for obvious reasons and i'm very happy with it but then I find out about this NVMe's. Would you say that this technology actually does everything the SSD does faster, like bootting and navegating through the PC's settings and files?
No, NVME is fine if you're getting a new SSD and if it's not that much more expensive. For a first SSD you might as well get a standard Sata model as in real life use you will find no noticable difference between the two. NVME is only useful if you, like in this video, use a RAMdrive, but nobody spends their day copying a few GB into RAM to then copy it to SSD...
NVME is mainly for benchmark purposes to say 'its higher'.
Note that nowadays several NVME SSD's are getting so cheap that there's so little difference in price between Sata and NVME that you might as well get the NVME one anyway, if there's a noticable price difference however you shouldn't bother spending more on NVME...
Ok thanks
My first computer had a 30MB hard drive and used to take about 4 minutes to load MSDos 3.1. I call that a massive inprouvement!
My first computer was a Sinclair. Followed by a C64 with cassette tape storage. And of all the other computers since, I have built all but two.
My first computer was a C64 without any form of secondary storage. LOL Chose to wait until the prices on the 1541 drive dropped from $600 to about $240 and just saved the money that would have been spent on a cassette data drive. Left it powered on for several days after typing in source listings from Compute Gazette more than once during that time frame. :P
The first micro computer I programmed was a Tandy Model I with a cassette drive for storage, running TRSDOS.(~1981-82)
The First computer I owned was a Lobo Max 80 that had 8" single sided, single density drives but I bought a case I put 2 half height 5.25" floppies and a 5 Megabyte, Full Height 5.25" Hard Drive in, running CP/M 2.2 & 3.0 as well as LDOS. (~1983)
The first computer I used to write something on - was an S-100 bus Z80 system running CP/M (~1980)
The First computer I wrote a program for school on was a main frame or mini - possibly a Cyber but I think that was the next semester. The program was written on punch cards. The next semester the computer had a Terminal and I could just type my program in. (~1980-1981).
The first modem I had that I connected to the school computer with was a 300 Baud DC Hayes (which it took me 15 hours to find out it did not understand lower case ...)
.
Carlos Eduardo Foltran ditto. I remember that was so intriguing with her that I had late nights with her. Tough to go to work. I even had HP tech come to my home and switched out the mother board. He said he had never done a residential job before. Can you imagine that?
It never ceases to amaze me how physically small, storage devices have got in just a few years. I recall having a tour of my university computer facilities in 1987, as a fresher, and being shown two brand new huge machines, that looked like industrial spin dryers. They were in fact, multi-plater disk drives, each holding around 200MB. Now here we are with this staggeringly fast solid state stick.
I think I've used WD drives in nearly every PC build I've made. They work, I trust them and that's about it haha!
I remember when the WD velociraptor launched all those years ago and the price of it was brutal.... but so was the speed of it! I loved seeing the test vids and the data transfer rate!
But this specifically relates to SSD's
Years ago, mid 200's I had a PC I built with the 120GB Raptor 10,000 RPM drive running Windows XP PRo. Was the fastest thing I had ever seen. So glad you did that.
Christopher, you have shattered my misconception that these little cards are under-powered laptop fodder.
Guess what my next build will be based upon!
Thank you Sir!!
Dude...you explains thing way better than many college teachers!
Thanks. :)
"How things have changed across time". I remember an 80MB HDD from 1980, you couldn't fit two in a standard shoe box, weighed around 10 lbs, and cost $1000's of dollars.
2 Years ago I spent around £550 on a 800GB u.2 Intel 750 series drive. At the time it was crazy fast at 2100MB (2267MB) and 800MB (953MB). I can't believe how far tech has come along. For about £300-400 you can match/beat the performance of my drive and get more capacity at the same time. Can't wait to see how fast my next ssd will be in a few years time :)
Somewhat off-topic, and not meant to really slam WD, but I had a lot of nightmares back in the day with failed WD drives. I got a lot of them replaced under warranty where they were purchased (in a system), and a few that I had to pay for myself, but at the time (back when Win 98/2000/ME were hot operating systems), I swore off paying for any WD products. If they were in a system I bought, so be it, but I refused to spec their drives, and if replacing one at my cost, I went with the competition. I know that not only WD, but all HDD and SSD manufacturers have come a long way with their products. Going forward, I might consider WD drives again, but I sure had a run of bad luck with them many years ago.
I will back that anecdotal evidence with my own. Back in the days of 20-40GB hard drives, I had several WDs go bad on me. The last one was the 40GB system drive in my Dell Dimension 8100 (circa 2001), which at least had the decency to fail slowly enough for me to image it to an 80GB drive, and swap it. That one is WD as well, and still working. (Just booted my old PC recently, when I replaced the batteries in my UPS. It still has the USB connection and software to the UPS.)
Wow I just found out your video suggested by TH-cam. And that WD Black drive you've been talking about is actually made in my current company at Batu Kawan, Penang, Malaysia. This is just mind blowing. I feel kinda proud of my own company lol.
This is great to hear. It is a very good product.
Thanks sir. Besides M.2 products, the company still produces CSS 2.5 (Brahma, Venus, Nike, WD models) and ESS 2.5 (Odyssey, Pegasus, Omaha, Aspen, Voyager models).
Amazing and brilliant! 🏆
So, start blushing again Chris, you have every right to! 😊
I have one of NVMe in my laptop, the speed is unbelievable amazing. But to see as numbers in parallel tests is even more exciting!
Can't wait for next video!
Thank you Chris!
Thanks Elvira. :)
Yep, once you go SSD, even if it is ‘just’ SATA SSD there is no going back. At work we are lucky enough to have a good 90% of machines with SSD’s fitted. If I come across one of the few that still has a spinner (as we call them) it feels soooo, slow.
I’m getting a new machine at the end of this year and hopefully there will be room in the budget for an NVMe equipped model.
I really enjoy your videos. This one in particular was particularly informative to me. I have been pretty out of the loop on modern storage technology since it's been 6 years since I built my PC, so I didn't really know anything about NVME technology. Just a couple days ago I upgraded my system from a 128GB SSD+1TB hard disk to a 2tb crucial mx500 SATA drive. Surely it's not as speedy as the drive in this video, but It's been a nice upgrade for me.
Thanks for the informative video!
I find 2TB on an SSD amazing! :) Enjoy your new storage.
I think Chris's editing skills have improved. This was kind of slick as we were switching between tests. Smooth.
Definitely hitting the like on this one , I do anyway on your videos. I'm still on a SATA Kingston 240 GB SSD , and wouldn't consider running the OS on a HDD again , so I can imagine my jaw dropping if I had one of those drives. Big thumbs up mate , thanks for another cool video.
there is little real world difference between ssd and nvme. I have both (including the one from video).
I moved my system from ssd to nvme and was really disappointed. No difference.
There is big difference between hdd and flash tho.
Sata and nmve SSDs are very similar in pure 4k random reads and writes(btw HDDs are 100 times slower, huge difference). Sure, nvme runs away with high queue depth and parallel disk operations but that's not beneficial in desktop applications in single user environment. However servers are completely different story. Also high linear speeds are nice if you transfer large files back and forward but again it's not typical for desktops. That's why nvme ssds are not big leap from sata ssds in desktop use.
my impression is that OS interferes a lot when copying large number of files (all the ownership checking and such - done on per-file basis), this is how it looks like (behaves differently when copying via windows shell, total commander or under linux)
well, at least this WD has 500GB (for moderate price), that is more future proof that older 240, so I am not complaining.
1)
The very fast speed of the NVMe drive is due to its fast buffer (probably using 20 or 40 GB of SLC NANDs). If you copy more than its buffer capacity, without rest, you will not get those very fast speed results. It will still be fast, but probably only 40% or 50% of the top speed. Some NVMe drives will run at top speed, 100% of the time, depending on the type of NAND cells that they are using (Samsung's "Pro" NVMe drives are an example of such drives, and is why they are more expensive).
2)
Unless you are doing backups, or some other large and sequential file transfers, the benchmark results that really matter, to 99% of the average user's experience, are the Q1T1 values.
3)
The reason PCs with SSDs boot up so fast is due to the values below the top row. Boot time is when Windows and other OS's are reading and writing all over the place.
Video editing is also all about transferring/access very large files.
What I like about this youtube blogger is that it´s British. Thanks
Managed to find a still brand-new-in-box 1TB unit similar to the one described in this video. Quite happy with it.
I had no idea that there are m.2 slots which support sata and NVMe SSDs. good to know!
Yeah what he didn't point out is that you have to be careful what type you get as some mobos sockets have 2 notches so it makes it impossible to fit an nvme in it, tbh getting a sata is like buying a skoda when you could have a ferrari.
I've got a Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB in my NUC acting as the HTPC I'm currently writing this on. The thing that amazes me the most is the incredible fast start up time. If it wasn't waiting a couple of seconds to give me the chance to enter bios, the little swine would be up and running like the flick of a switch.
3GB isnt really big enough, at full theoretical speed it would take less than 1 second to complete, so the speed of windows intitating the read takes longer than the actual transfer. Great video as always though.
Chris, since it wasn't available from ExplainingComputers merchandise, I custom made a shirt. It has an m.2 NVMe drive in the center surrounded by the words "NVME is for me!!!" I could only do this with your explanation so thank you VERY much.
Great idea for a shirt! I must expand the merch range. :)
Chris, Windows 7 will work just fine with NVME if you install two updates: KB2990941 and KB3087873. These aren't available on normal Windows Update, but need to be downloaded separately from Microsoft. I would also advise to install SSD manufacturer's NVME driver over Microsoft's generic one for best performance.
Now about my personal NVME experience.
I've only recently switched to an NVME SSD (Samsing Evo 960 500 GB) in my main rig.
It's an old beast, based on an i7 2600k, so I had to use a PCI-E adapter and some BIOS modding to get it to boot from a PCI-E card. Speed is only ~1700 MB/s due to PCI-E 2.0 limitations.
In real life, NVME doesn't feel much faster than my old SATA SSD to me. Maybe that's because my OS installation is close to 10 years old (Windows 7, installed in 2009 or so).
Totally accepted -- I said that there is no native NVMe support in Windows 7. And I did not want to disturb a critical install for testing purposes only.
Might be useful to point out that there are two generations of this drive. I bought the exact same model, 1 year ago and it was doing around 1700/800 in the same test. The drive you have here is the "Gen2" version, which is almost double those speeds. The two generations are not necessarily indicated when you order them so beware. That said, it is a great drive, never overheats, and gets me into windows-10 from a cold boot in about 3 seconds. Love your videos peace!
Yes, this is the latest (2018) version of the WD Black NVMe SSD.
I'm one of those guys who started from DOS (with Norton Commander) and Windows 3.0, and I have had a ton of problems with HDDs during these 25 or so years. The ones that really emptied my pockets back in those years were the Seagates (a brand name I cannot stand to hear anymore). The ones that never ever failed me were the WD HDDs. I'm on year 8 on my WD Blue 500GB and WD Black 2TB drives which still run Windows Vista and Windows 7 for me just great (hope I don't jinx myself now). But recently I decided to move to SSD for Win7, maybe even to a M.2 NVMe. Yet the problem is that I have a 2010 or 2011 Sabertooth X58 motherboard, which recently failed once for unknown reasons, then got "repaired", and now sometimes freezes until rebooted (I don't know why...). However, it doesn't have a port for M.2. Is it possible to do that for my system? The motherboard is on BIOS and, as far as I know, doesn't have that UEFI.
STILL using the same 750 gb and 450gb WD black hds for over ten years now.Been using WDs for over 25 years now and never had one fail.I usually outgrow them.Just bought the WD Black NVMe SSD 250 for my new C:/drive win10 install.
On ebay, the 256 GB ver is $100, and the 512 is $160 (both new). I'll be buying one of these and putting my SM-961 into a SATA enclosure. Thanks for showing this.
Always good to shop around! :)
my normal lenguaje is spanish, but you video have an good explication for this ssd, good video men!
I know this is an older video but I can only echo the sentiments of all others when I say that changing to an SSD was a revolutionary upgrade. On my old setup (Core 2 Quad) the change felt as though the whole system gained 20-30% in performance, and that is only with a budget SATA SSD! My new PC has an NVMe supported M.2 slot, and when a few more coins are in the piggy bank (to get something with a reasonable capacity), I will certainly be swapping to an NVMe drive.
Seriously love you and your channel. When you went back to western digital raptor drives I lost my shit. I used to have two of them in raid when I was very poor and much younger. I thought I was the shit. Both failed towards end of warrenty and since I had the small capacity 36.6 gigs i believe WD sent me two replacements of the 74 gig drives because they had no stock of the smaller capacity. Western Digital has always been my favorite brand of hard drives and I am happy to see them get a solid footing in the m.2 format. Been using samsung past 5 years on ssds but next build will be exclusively m.2 and preferably WD.
I too had a machine with two 36GB Raptors and thought it was the most amazing thing ever! :) Happy days. I feel a lot less emotional connection to the hardware these days.
WD drives always seem to fail way before they should.
It feels like I went back in time to learn about current technology. Very nostalgic. Very well done!
This is where the Moore's Law rubber meets the read/road write/road. So cool! TY!
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, thank you for the like, your channel is par excellence. You humble me.
Thank you for the video! I've been using that same drive with my Linux Mint installation for a while now and couldn't be happier.
Fascinating .. I am planning to build my own computer .. some time next year using perfectly good desktop with good working fan etc .. but a not very nice sales man sold it to me without mentioning vista xp was on the way out .. but as a Hoarder I have lots of bits & an extra hd screen .. Even as an older person starting out late in life I am keen & excited .. but this will be next new years project .. bye keep up the good work ..
One of the coolest thing I have noticed is how clean all of your old devices appear. I'm a new subscriber and loving it! I wonder if you already have a video on how you clean your devices and what tips and tricks you recommend. Really excited to explore your videos and learn more about my computer and how to one day understand as much as I can to be able to successfully build my own.
I spend a lot of time chasing/removing dust, especially in close-up shots. Sometimes I use BluTak to remove dust. Often a cotton cloth or gloves, sometimes a dust blower (I have an electrical computer one).
Nice use of blutak, the IT engineer's friend ! Great video, thank you.
My first SSD was a 16 GB Mtron that could barely hold Windows XP. This was never a problem. The acces times were mind blowing.
I am looking to upgrade from an Intel 160GB SSD to an NVME type SSD. It will require a big upgrade of basically my whole system. Your videos have been instrumental in guiding the way. Thanks for the great content! Liked and subscribed, dear sir!
Thanks for watching and the sub! :)
Amazing to see the Velociraptor getting beat so bad lol, but imagine a few more years from now, thats had bad the NVMe will be beaten lol
In 1984, I drove from SF down to San Jose to buy a hard drive to install for a customer: 10 MB for only $1200! (price direct from the manufacturer [c. $2900/£2360 in 2019])
Today (Aug. 2019) you can get a 1 TB M.2 2280 NVMe SSD (from Micro Center) for $108/£88.
(But you really won't understand the excitement those early hard drives caused unless you've dropped a stack of punch cards in the rain...)
Amazing, this must be the "alien technology" they found in the Roswell UFO, nothing else can explain such an advance.
I remember the first system I built from scratch back in '04 had a 74 GB Raptor drive and oh boy were those suckers loud - it kind of sounded like a 747 taking off whenever you had to transfer a lot of files. I've been using SSDs for the last 5 years and won't be going back to mechanical again. Much faster, quieter and more reliable than HDDs, although I do use mechanical drives as a backup volume for the time being (4 TB SSDs aren't at a place yet where I can buy one). Speaking of odd mediums, would love it you could cover tape drives and namely the new LTO formats recently released that can top 30 TB of storage on a single $100 tape! If the drives weren't so bloody expensive I'd choose that over mechanical drives any day of the week for archival purposes!
Very informative review, thanks.
If I were to fit one of these devices to my PC would all my friends all envy me? Envy me, get it? I'll get my coat.....................
It's SATA funny, but don't flash in your coat.
Not that it matters since its just SATA but mSATA drives are still being produced and are even smaller than M.2 for some devices and go as high as 1tb, maybe more
I'd love to see some benchmarks on an "old faithful" Seagate ST-225 LOL!
I installed it yesterday on my laptop and it's night and day compare to a regular HDD
Storage devices facinate me in a way other computer components dont
Still got my raptor on the go, gives me a kick when I hear the racket it makes spooling up. 2009 I bought it, things certainly have changed!
I like he sound of a Raptor. :)
ExplainingComputers Me too, ssd's are great but I do still enjoy the mechanical sounds that come with hd's. Click! Whine! Whizz! Crunch crunch crunch!
Thank you for your informative videos by the way :)
I have an older MSI Z77A-GD80 i7 motherboard with no M.2 slots. I was able to buy a PCIe M.2 adapter board but the next challenge was the BIOS of that vintage not having NVMe drivers to allow a native boot of the OS on it.
Fortunately the MSI BIOS is modular and can be "patched" via a special utility to copy the NVMe driver module from another BIOS image (which natively supports NVMe) to my model thus creating a special BIOS image. The OEM BIOS hasn't been updated in years so there's no expectation that I have to re-patch for a new release.
I have the fastest CPU for the board so my next upgrade will involve upgrading to a newer model which will have NVMe support out of the box. Personally I'm awaiting for updated CPUs with the known execution bugs fixed in silicon.
I try to stay away from upgrades that don't include seriously impactful things like the GPU within a single system. The return on investment for performance can be a little dicey. (i.e. You might have PCIe lanes that run through an alternate controller that's slower, or you might have bugs and corruption that you can't work around.) Instead, I save the money and do full platform upgrades every 5-7 years. (I'm still rocking the old pre-Ryzen AMD FX8350, for example.) I find that I can still get everything I want done in a time that's acceptable, but when I do find it a little painful to work with or it is so limited that it doesn't support modern systems and applications, I'll move on.
Based on the performance I'm seeing, it should be a while before I need an upgrade. I also have a GTX 1070, so that's helped most performance issues in applications that require higher GPU usage.
The best part is that when I do finally upgrade to the replacement, it's going to feel that much faster and more powerful than stagger-stepping up. I also wait for about 6-9 months on newer platforms, to cut away the 'early adopter tax' of initial pricing, and the bugs that come with day 1 releases. Ryzen and Ryzen 2 were a little buggy at the start, and Intel's still problematic with their un-patched architecture, which might be patched by Ice Lake's release.
We are cut from similar cloth. I try to wait until the MB and chipset is a large enough leap that I can do several CPU/GPU upgrades over the life of the build. I'm on my 5th-6th primary system in 20+ years; all of my systems dating back to the late 80's have been home-built. Before that was my old TRS-80 Mod I.
Still looking for a USB 3 lawn trespass evacuation command module though.
Damned kids.
Some times read is slower because when writing it is just stored in ram on the card(it has it's own built in dma type thing) then transferred in the background to the non volatile memory but the read has to go to the non volatile storage.
This was so clearly explained. Thank you
It's amazing to see how this exact SSD is now $44 USD at Wal-Mart, storage capacity for these drives grows and their price drops fast
That is truly amazing. Wow. How prices tumble.
Fascinating, I actually laughed out loud in happiness! Thanks for sharing knowledge!
Writes go straight to NAND so can be faster at times when saving stuff normally affects 4k 1 queue depth due to windows buffers (ram on the ssd is for page only, no cache buffered writes)
Caveman here. I'm planning to upgrade my 2008 computer. NVMe drives... bios with graphical UI and mouse support... CPUs with 32 cores... guys, what's going on in here? Is it Earth?
It is a strange new Earth. :)
Good vid! The apparently faster write speed is probably a buffering effect. Actual writing to NAND flash is fundamentally slowing than reading, but a write operation is amenable to buffering while a read operation is not.
since u made alot of ssds videos, would you make a video benchmarking between WD black and Samsung Pro ?
This! Please!
Very interesting. I used to have a raptor drive and still recall the noise it used to make!
A raptor has such a distinctive sound! :)
I've got 2 of your books. "THE NEXT BIG THING" and "DIGITAL GENESIS".
Excellent! Appeciated. :)
The one issue with NVMe is throttling due to heat. The thin form factor mean you need to ensure better heat management
When I win on the Lottery I know what to get now for my super computer. When?. Anyhow thanks for some very useful information on upgrading computers.
Single best tech channel on youtube, hands down. No long ridiculous hair, crazy old fat guy or skinny kid with ear rings array, and don't have duplicate german versions. Think i summed up who EC is better than :D Extra points if you can name the 4 ppl i mentioned :D thanks for playing.
What PC (CPU, motherboard, RAM) did you use? I've heard latest Intel chipsets have some issues not enabling good speeds on M.2 slot. Anyone knows more about this? I have a bit older computer, H97 4th series Gigabyte board, I7 4770, 8GB DDR3. Would this drive come even remotely close to the speeds in this video on my machine?
The board is a Gigabyte H170 DS3H with an i7 CPU. I very much doubt you will get this performance on an H97 motherboard as it has a very early NVMe implementation. Remember, M.2 is not an interface standard, it a physical connector that can support many different interfaces (eg SATA and different PCIe implementations, such as NVMe).
Brilliant. Every video so far is a learning curve. Thank you
Too bad that SSDs are still pricy, just like RAM. Which is even more weird because WD announced recently dropping the production of HDDs. Im now trying to build a starter PC for the video editing (that could run Avid, Adobe, Da Vinci Resolve) and the prices of RAM memory are still quite big. Still dont understand why I could buy 16GB (2x8) of RAM in 2016 for less money than now. Same with SSDs which is why Im probably still going to buy HDD for data storage and only a smaller SSD for the projects
I still edit of HDD, but boot from SSD. RAM prices reflect supply and demand -- RAM has certainly been cheaper on occasions in the past.
ExplainingComputers thank you! So do you think I should go for 16 GB or just buy 8 and wait for better prices to upgrade ?
They are likely keeping them artificially high similar to GPU's due to sudden increase on people mining cryto currency.
Unless you are editing 4K, I would opt for 8GB right now. I edit HD on an 8GB RAM machine with no issues.
Thank you very much for the help ! Im not yet planning on 4K editing, since Im just starting, and Ill probably do my first paid projects on 1080p. I can always do an upgrade later. Thanks once more, I owe you one !
Also I havent thought about the crypto currency mining. But if that would be the case, then prices should drop by some time
My favourite Hard Drive brand was Samsung, until they were acquired by Seagate! (makes sign of a cross!) My favourite HDD brand is now Western Digital, followed by HGST. I've just started testing a Samsung SSD as a boot drive.
No more hard drives no more dealing with wires
I was benchmarking an NVMe drive by another manufacturer, Samsung, a year or two ago. Like you, I used Windows 10, and with CrystalDiskMark I got much higher numbers than with SATA. They were somewhat lower than advertised, but still much higher than for SATA. However, I also used AS SSD, an alternative disk benchmarking tool for Windows. This showed very poor performance indeed, especially in the non-sequential tests, and in the latency test (an analog of which I didn't find in CrystalDiskMark). The latency was off by a factor of a thousand or so. I studied this more, and found that also another benchmarking tool called Anvil Storage Utilities could reproduce the poor results. The solution was to install the NVMe Windows drivers that you can download from Samsung. Using these instead of Microsoft's generic NVMe drivers made all the benchmarks according to the specs. Separately, I purchased another computer and put a different Samsung NVMe drive in it, and the benchmarking software reported the exact same problems, and the same fix worked a second time. I want also to be clear that I *did* see a real-world performance improvement after I upgraded the driver, although this did require me to time some long-running operations.
The problem I had was almost certainly limited to Samsung drives, but let this serve as a cautionary tale that people should try multiple benchmarking tools before being satisfied that they have good performance with the NVMe drives.
Good post, thanks.
I liked how you tested NVME SSD but I think you forgot something realy important to show here. M.2 SSD format have no cooling at all and those drivers can get realy realy hot and quite fast and then throttle down to a very slow mechanical drive. Just by running a few times ASSSD or Christal Disk Mark bench your NVME drives will go up to 75°c in no time :
I did some test with Intel 600p drivers and since the motherboard didn't had M.2 slot (Sabertooth Z97/x79) I used à PCI-E to M.2 card which was way more cooled than regular M.2 slots, it was in front of a 120mm noctua and no graphic car close enough to influance temperature and it still got up to +75°c in less than 15mn running those benchs.
That's the reason why I dont recommand M.2 slot drives as they cost more and have that overheating probleme that can end up destroying them realy fast. 2.5 or PCI-E descent drives usualy have nice passive cooling system like aluminium case (Crucial, Intel, etc) or heatsink + thermal pads.
Good point.
Very nice video Chris. Happy to see you are using your own test apart from commonly used software. Could you please explain or make video on comparison of SATA SSD with NVMe for day to day tasks like opening browser, word processor, excel, saving files etc. This would give clear idea to common users like me who don't indulge in gaming or even large content file copying etc. Just to make it more appealing you can even add normal HDD in comparison to both SSDs. Thanks in advance.
You will see little or no difference with a SATA vs NVMe SSD in most general computing -- the differences as you suggest lie in very data intensive things like video editing. If you are not sitting there thinking "I am being slowed down by drive speed", you are unlikely to benefit from an NVMe drive. :)
Have you heard that WD closed one of their HDD factories last week?
I had not heard. For others, here is a link: www.tomshardware.co.uk/western-digital-hdd-malaysia,news-58844.html SSD technology is clearly doing to have a greater and greater impact on the HDD market.
I will miss HDDs, but alas it is time to move on
Hard drives will still be available on market for some time due the fact that they are great at storing large amounts of data and being reasonably cheaper per megabyte of data. This doesn't mean that HDDs will remain for a long time, but they will definitely be available while there will be demand for them.
SSDs still cant hold a candle to spinning drives for mass storage.... Look at the new Macbook.. a 4tb SSD is a $3200 upgrade??!!!!! I know that's an extreme case because Apple but still... A 8-12tb drive is dirt cheap in comparison for mass storage
Just to be clear, they still have a lot of factories for spinning rust, closing this factory just shows that they expect that the sales will decrease. That makes a lot of sense, people still need spinning rust for mass storage (I have more than what I care to admit) but in laptops and prebuilt desktops these days they sell those more frequently with a SSD for the installed software. This might explain the decreased demand, I speculate.
I won't miss hard drives at all. Slow, noisy, high latency, unreliable, heavy, clumsy, big. Good riddance. Sorry. Don't get me wrong, the technology of hard drives is impressive, like the technology of combustion engines in cars, but just like the electric car is much more efficient and drives much more comfortably the SSD is a much better technology than the hard drive for all the installed software.
Video editors will be mastering so fast with NVMe tech. I remember going for lunch....
Are you considering the cache? If I select a file to copy and wait a bit before I paste the speed is faster. Like copying from my data drive to HDD it does it instantly.
I was very careful in my testing to ensure that cache was not impacting the results.
The cache will only increase the speed at first and then drop to it's normal speed if it had any effect, looks like it's seen with the hard drive benchmark, but you don't see it with the SSDs, probably because they are already running at their maximum speeds, The 3GB file size will negate that anyway. A cache is added to increase speed so i don't understand why it should not be taken into effect. You could have 2 HDD drives, 7200RPM for example and only difference between them could be a bad cache and a good one. I'd take the one with the good cache anytime.
Great video Chris - It's clear, concise and professional as always. I liked when you added the Raptor drive for comparison - I remember these were amazing drives for the time.