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HDTUNE
HD Tune is a Hard Disk Utility with many functions from error checking, health testing (S.M.A.R.T.), and of course benchmarking. To build upon our real world write test we also looked to see where the write speeds leveled off to by using HD Tune Pro. If SLC caching is being utilized, this test will typically show it.
Finally, taking a look at how it performs under HDTune’s full write test, we can see that once the SLC cache fills that the write performance will degrade to about 1.4GB/s, which is still very respectable.
REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
At the beginning of our review, we said we would tell you why you need one of these SSDs. After reading through everything so far, we’re pretty sure that we don’t need to. The new WD Black and SanDisk Extreme Pro are some of the best SSDs out. They are built on years of knowledge and cutting-edge technology. As we said before, the first gen WD black just didn’t seem to fit for the title of Black. With a strong heritage of being top notch, it just wasn’t. The new Black and Extreme Pro are worthy successors to their brands.
While they didn’t take out the Samsung 960 Pro in our Standard run of PCMark 8 and idle power consumption could be improved, it made up for its weaknesses by surpassing the 960 Pro and every other NAND based PCIe SSD we have tested during the Extended run in the recovery round. It’s as if the more they are used the faster they get! If that doesn’t say something about these drives, we don’t know what else to tell you. They are simply bad ass. In a way, they are even like Dragon Ball’s Senzu Beans. When you think the fight is over, you’ve done everything you can to speed up your system and you think there is no hope left, just pop one of these bad boys to revive it and unleash its full power. Or maybe they are more like Goku and will attain Ultra Instinct soon enough…hehe.
Anyways, let’s get back on topic. Do you want to load the latest games as fast as possible? Want to render those 4K and even 8K video clips? Is your current storage solution letting you down? Just get one of these drives, it’s that simple. With a whopping 3.4GB/s read and 2.8GB/s write speed on tap and over 500K/400K IOPS read/write at your disposal, almost anything is possible. The only thing out there that can really beat it is Intel’s Optane…but those are limited in capacity options and are still quite the premium over NAND based SSDs at 2-3x the cost per GB.
With that said, the topic of value is brought into the picture. These are some of the fastest SSDs out, but unlike Intel Optane SSDs their prices are very competitive. So competitive even that they undercut the Samsung 960 EVO 1TB by $30 at the time of writing. Not to mention they come with a 5yr warranty and their endurance figures match the Samsung 960 Pro! This makes the new WD Black and SanDisk Extreme Pro M.2 NVMe SSDs a very good value and has earned them our Gold Seal of Approval.
Check Out the WD Black M.2 NVMe SSDs at Amazon!
Check Out the SanDisk Extreme Pro M.2 NVMe SSDs at Amazon!
