pSLC Cache / Write Intensive Usage

When copying games from your Steam Library or other very large files (>10 GB), you might have noticed that write speeds on your SSD start out at full speed and then drop considerably. The underlying reason is that modern drives have caches that soak up write bursts to improve performance. In the fairly uncommon scenario of writing data that's too big to fit into these caches, the drive will have to write data directly to flash, and it will probably juggle some out of its write cache at the same time, which can result in a significant loss of write speed. Newer TLC drives use part of their capacity in SLC mode for increased performance. This test can reveal the size of that pseudo-SLC cache.

Testing on this page looks at exactly that scenario. We write a sequential stream of 1 MB blocks to the drive in a single thread, like a typical file-copy operation would do, and measure write speeds twice a second. The drive is fully erased before testing to ensure any caches are emptied. Please note that this test writes a lot of data in a very short time, which is something most consumers will never do.


Write speed starts out at close to 2.5 GB/s, but are sustained for only a few seconds because WD configured the SLC cache on this drive to be tiny by today's and yesterday's standards. With only 12 GB, it is smaller than any other drive we've ever tested with the exception of two other drives from WD. Looks like whoever is on the design team for these drives is stuck in the past. Filling the whole drive completes at 587 MB/s, which is a decent result for a value-oriented SSD, but clearly much lower than than the 1 GB/s+ scores of higher-end PCIe 3.0 SSDs. When write activity stops and the SLC cache has had time to free up some capacity, full write rates are restored within seconds.