Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue Review: WD Enters the Consumer SSD Market
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 3, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Overall System Performance using PCMark Vantage
Next up is PCMark Vantage, another system-wide performance suite. For those of you who aren’t familiar with PCMark Vantage, it ends up being the most real-world-like hard drive test I can come up with. It runs things like application launches, file searches, web browsing, contacts searching, video playback, photo editing and other completely mundane but real-world tasks. I’ve described the benchmark in great detail before but if you’d like to read up on what it does in particular, take a look at Futuremark’s whitepaper on the benchmark; it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to be a member of a comprehensive storage benchmark suite. Any performance impacts here would most likely be reflected in the real world.
Our PCMark results echo what we've seen in the synthetic tests - the SiliconEdge Blue performs like an entry level Indilinx drive.
The memories suite includes a test involving importing pictures into Windows Photo Gallery and editing them, a fairly benign task that easily falls into the category of being very influenced by disk performance.
The TV and Movies tests focus on on video transcoding which is mostly CPU bound, but one of the tests involves Windows Media Center which tends to be disk bound.
The gaming tests are very well suited to SSDs since they spend a good portion of their time focusing on reading textures and loading level data. All of the SSDs dominate here, but as you'll see later on in my gaming tests the benefits of an SSD really vary depending on the game. Take these results as a best case scenario of what can happen, not the norm.
In the Music suite the main test is a multitasking scenario: the test simulates surfing the web in IE7, transcoding an audio file and adding music to Windows Media Player (the most disk intensive portion of the test).
The Communications suite is made up of two tests, both involving light multitasking. The first test simulates data encryption/decryption while running message rules in Windows Mail. The second test simulates web surfing (including opening/closing tabs) in IE7, data decryption and running Windows Defender.
I love PCMark's Productivity test; in this test there are four tasks going on at once, searching through Windows contacts, searching through Windows Mail, browsing multiple webpages in IE7 and loading applications. This is as real world of a scenario as you get and it happens to be representative of one of the most frustrating HDD usage models - trying to do multiple things at once. There's nothing more annoying than trying to launch a simple application while you're doing other things in the background and have the load take forever.
The final PCMark Vantage suite is HDD specific and this is where you'll see the biggest differences between the drives:
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chuckbam - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
I buy Intel for the Intel SSD Toolbox utility. With win7, I load the Intel chipset inf, Matrix Storage Manager and am not sure if Trim still works.I am happy to see WD into this market. Prices need to come WAY DOWN!
Sabresiberian - Saturday, March 13, 2010 - link
As a great fan of the Raptor series drives, what I want from WD is the same concept in SSD: the top performance and super reliability it is. The down side of course in a VelociRaptor is its relative price - and, as expensive as SSDs still are, a comparable price for an SSD "VelociRaptor" would be extreme.Still, it's what I want, and I could certainly see me building a high-end system using smaller capacity WD SSD "Raptors" in Raid 0 for that extreme performance goofy people like me want to have. If I get an extra few grand handed to me, I would use larger drives, of course.
Anyhoo, this drive is not what I want to see from WD (unless of course it really does kick reliability butt over its competitors). Hopefully by the time I build another high-end rig (just built one so it will be awhile, likely) WD will have what I want (or someone), a SSD successor to VelociRaptor mechanical hard drives.
liquoredonlife - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
Great article Anand! Also thanks for reiterating the incompatibility with gen2 unibody macbook pro's and particular SSDs. Will you be able to test this SSD with your mbp?heulenwolf - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - link
Anand mentioned some possible convergence between magnetic and solid state drive firmware development. Could this mean the mythical hybrid drive is down the road somewhere? With single spindles holding in excess of 300 GB and SSDs not even filling the 2.5" form factor, isn't there room for both? If not both storage types in one drive then maybe both storage types in one drive slot? Then you could have the boot drive be the super fast SSD and the advantage of cheaper, higher-capacity storage of a single-spindle magnetic drive in a single laptop. I think this dual-drive approach could be a better solution than the hybrid drive until caching in drive controllers becomes smarter.GullLars - Sunday, March 7, 2010 - link
These drives clearly don't support NCQ, as IOPS don't scale with QD.The rating of 5000 IOPS is about the same as the rating of a single NAND TSOP. You can literaly get the same random IOPS performance from a thumbnail USB drive.
ky - Thursday, March 4, 2010 - link
Can someone explain why there's a dropoff in performance between the 100GB and 50GB Mercury Extreme SSDs in the 4K Aligned random write test?cactusdog - Thursday, March 4, 2010 - link
Oh well nothing to see here either. I dont see how they can justify the price. A SSD with a PCB and some chips should be cheaper to make than a mechanical hard drive with moving metal parts. Fair enough to pay a little extra for new tech but this is ridiculous.Hrel - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - link
I'd really like to see performance of two 7200rpm drives in a striped RAID thrown into these charts. So please get on that.7Enigma - Thursday, March 4, 2010 - link
I'll save you the time of waiting.-Sequential Read and Write: Near twice the performance of a single drive
-Random 4K read/write: Just as bad as a single drive
Fin~
GeorgeH - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - link
Going from WD's HDD naming conventions I would expect average but reliable performance from a "Blue" SSD, and that appears to be exactly what they've delivered, albeit at a ridiculously high price.The WD SSD I'm really interested in is the "SiliconEdge Black", a drive that will hopefully be forthcoming after their sales division puts down the crack pipe and gets serious about SSD pricing.