WD Black SN7100 2 TB

[BSim500]

It’s just that DRAM-less is always listed in the “Cons” which was understandable previously. But if this drive (and others) is faster than, say, Samsung 990 Pro, it makes you wonder at what point presence or absence of DRAM will simply be something noteworthy, and no longer seen as a pro or con

DRAM-less is still a con for putting a NVMe drive in an external USB caddy (HMB only works on internal drives directly over the NVMe bus). Without that, every single read / write to the Flash Translation Layer has to go to the drive "raw" without being cached into RAM like an old SATA DRAM-less drive.

I've already bought NM790s because WD are unable to supply the capacity people are looking for these days

Same here. Not only 4TB NM790 for very little cost but in a single-sided form factor at that (so it actually fits thin & light laptops too). Speaking of which it looks like WD still haven't fixed that sky high idle power draw even with ASPM on. Laptop / handheld users beware...

 

[W1zzard]

Price is too close to 2TB 990Pro which is $170 at MC.

not sure if 140 vs 170 is close (21%) for 2% perf

fixed the tbw rating in the table

 

[human_error]

Nice review for an excellent drive.

As an SN770 owner I couldn't buy one though - issues with the top slot in MSI Tomahawk X670E motherboards prevents them from recognizing SN770 or SN850X drives with any BIOS newer than summer last year. It's specific to the slot directly connected to the CPU and no one (WD or MSI) seem to be paying any attention to fixing it, despite a large number of reports from lots of users.

Completely destroyed my confidence in both companies at this stage, which is a shame as I love the performance of my WD SSDs. Just can't use them in all the slots in my PC anymore.

 

[THU31]

I would've thought a single nand chip would lower the cost in a meaningful way. But I guess it's manufactured on a newer, more expensive node?

Anyway, I was already impressed by the 1 TB modules, so seeing 2 TB in such a tiny chip is crazy. Seems like the PCB is also kind of a waste. Wouldn't all the components easily fit in the 2230 format?

 

[Sunlight91]

Did you test the SN5000? Apparently it has the same Polaris 3 controller and Western Digital just limits it for different products.
My new laptops SN5000S is a strange OEM only middle variant.

SN5000: 5500/5000MB/s
SN5000S: 6000/5400MB/s
SN7100: 7250/6900MB/s

 

[Balzoro]

Nice review for an excellent drive.

As an SN770 owner I couldn't buy one though - issues with the top slot in MSI Tomahawk X670E motherboards prevents them from recognizing SN770 or SN850X drives with any BIOS newer than summer last year. It's specific to the slot directly connected to the CPU and no one (WD or MSI) seem to be paying any attention to fixing it, despite a large number of reports from lots of users.

Completely destroyed my confidence in both companies at this stage, which is a shame as I love the performance of my WD SSDs. Just can't use them in all the slots in my PC anymore.

What I’ve personally learned from the X870 Tomahawk (that I ended up returning) is that MSI makes great hardware but drops the ball on the BIOS side.
After all of the comments and issues I’ve seen reported on their own forums, plus my own experience- I’m just not going to be their customer anymore.
Funny enough, for all its faults - ASUS came to the rescue and the more expensive ROG Strix MB gave me zero issues so I ended up keeping it. Might be worth a shot for you

So btw, if as a dev my use cases are:
1. unzipping large asset files (50+GB)
2. installing large applications frequently (also work related)

A gen5 SSD should technically be significantly better than a gen4, right?
That’s confusing because I though for unzipping we’re talking about sequential and not random speeds that matter, and gen5 offers a massive increase in that category, but for some reason in this review it seems like the difference between this gen4 SSD to a gen5 SSD is minuscule with <2s difference for these use cases (unzipping and installing large applications). Can someone explain why is that given the massive sequencial speeds difference for gen 5?

 

[notanin]

Price is too close to 2TB 990Pro which is $170 at MC. They do perform similarly though.

SN7100 is 20% cheaper and 2% faster, nice deal

> Did you test the SN5000?
Oh wow, missed completely that it exists. Funny enough it does have 4TB option

 

[phints]

Interesting drive, if this was 2 years ago and I still needed a PCIe 4.0 nvme, but why has WD or Samsung not done a PCIe 5.0 drive yet?

 

[Balzoro]

Interesting drive, if this was 2 years ago and I still needed a PCIe 4.0 nvme, but why has WD or Samsung not done a PCIe 5.0 drive yet?

As someone that tried a crucial gen5 SSD (ended up returning it), I think the controllers were just not ready for mainstream. Even in a big dual chamber case with 6 intake fans, it was reaching 70c max temp which funny enough Crucial support said that if you pass that temp you might void warranty .. which is ridiculous because it was difficult NOT to. That’s why I ended up retuning it - I didn’t want any future warranty issues.
If I remember correctly a new more efficient controller was just announced at CES and theoretically a new age of gen5 SSD should begin

 

[Wirko]

DRAM-less is still a con for putting a NVMe drive in an external USB caddy (HMB only works on internal drives directly over the NVMe bus). Without that, every single read / write to the Flash Translation Layer has to go to the drive "raw" without being cached into RAM like an old SATA DRAM-less drive.

True. Apart from external USB enclosures, there may be other platforms where HMB doesn't always work or isn't reliable. I don't know, just guessing: Handhelds? NAS boxes? RAID arrays? Anything connected over a PCIe switch chip?

Speaking of which it looks like WD still haven't fixed that sky high idle power draw even with ASPM on. Laptop / handheld users beware...

The part about notebooks is not necessarily true. WD's implementation of ASPM may just be incompatible with desktop systems, or some of them.

@W1zzard , here's plan W (named after James Watt). Can you take a thermal image of the SN7100 sitting idle in a desktop PC and then the same in a notebook, in similar conditions such as (poor) airflow and Windows version? If it's able to reach a low power state in the notebook, but not in the desktop, there would be a clear difference in the images.

 

[Clawedge]

Regarding temperature, did software monitor match actual measured temp?

Yes? No?

 

[InVasMani]

Good overall and high efficiency, but priced to high relative to other options. It could use some price adjustments. If it were closer in price to the value leader it would be a easier recommendation. It doesn't need to match that price, but should be a good bit closer in parity.

 

[Wirko]

So btw, if as a dev my use cases are:
1. unzipping large asset files (50+GB)
2. installing large applications frequently (also work related)

A gen4 SSD should technically be significantly better than a gen5, right? That’s confusing because I though for unzipping we’re talking about sequential and not random speeds that matter, and gen5 offers a massive increase in that category, but for some reason in this review it seems like the difference between this gen4 SSD to a gen5 SSD is minuscule with <2s difference for these use cases (unzipping and installing large applications). Can someone explain why is that given the massive sequencial speeds difference for gen 5?

Unzipping means writing a lot of small files, which makes the process much slower than any operation with large files only.

Can you run the unzip application, whichever you have, just to test the archive without unzipping? Do you achieve good throughput in GB/s?

 

[Balzoro]

Unzipping means writing a lot of small files, which makes the process much slower than any operation with large files only.

Can you run the unzip application, whichever you have, just to test the archive without unzipping? Do you achieve good throughput in GB/s?

Fwiw the original question had a typo, the question was supposed to be is gen5 is supposed to be better than gen4, not the other way around.

And to reiterate in case the question sounded a bit too naive - I know that technically it is, however gen5 differ than gen4 mostly when it comes to (significantly!) higher sequential speeds which is supposed to be what matters when installing large applications and even unzipping (compared to random which is more for OS operations or video games) - which is why I’m confused regarding the results here - it seems like gen5 offers almost no speed benefits over gen4 when it comes to use cases it’s supposed to excel at compared to gen4 (such as installing large applications as mentioned about). So I’m confused about the results.

and regarding your questions - unfortunately I’m away this week and don’t have access to my setup. But I think the answer is yes..

 

[oiawshboiwsahnoidaws]

shame about the high idle power consumption