What is your data worth? All those files, pictures, music, videos all must be stored somewhere safe and reliable. Most of us regular Joes opt for a pen drive or maybe one of the many cloud services that are available. However, what if you are running a company and require information or data to be written and read as fast as possible, you probably have no other options other than getting your company an SSD, but some of these drives are still not as fast to transfer and write from and to many computers at the same time and the storage capacities are not good enough for an enterprise. Western Digital has offered a solution and it comes in a form of a unique and extremely well-designed 3D NAND SSD with storage capacity up to 1TB which is the exact device we have reviewed
Before we go into the review, some of you might be wondering, what the difference between a regular SSD and a 3D NAND SSD. Regular SSDs use 2D or planar NAND system, which would be good if you don’t need a lot of space and are happy with the transfer speeds of a regular SSDs. Problems with a 2D NAND SSD is that, if manufacturers were to shrink the flash memory to increase storage size, it would lead to problems like the reliability of the data being intact. 3D NANDs basically have stacks of flash memory which is able to do two things, increase the storage capacity tremendously while maintaining the size of the drive and offer read and write speeds that are much faster than a regular SSD. The only drawback here is the production cost which is significantly higher than normal SSDs, and this 1TB WD 3D NAND SSD will run you about RM2000.
Design
Well, if you have seen an SSD before then this will be very familiar to you as it looks like any regular SSD and includes the same connectors for power and data transfer. As you can see from the photo it is not bigger or smaller than a regular SSD even if it is a 3D NAND, So you don’t have to worry about it taking up space in your build as it would fit into any SSD bay or mount.
Speeds
Now, this is where it gets impressive because this SSD can reach speeds of up to 560mb/s and we have the numbers to prove it to you.
As you can see this is the results of the speeds and we are not blowing it up when we say it is extremely fast, this test was performed three times to ensure that there is no error or miscalculation in the speeds. And this really shows when it comes to real-world use as we were transferring 10GB with a total of 800 files took less than 20 seconds. For those of you that don’t know, if the total size of your transfer is small but consist of many files, it will still slow down the transfer speed as the files still needs to be indexed by the storage device and the system to keep the files intact.
For the sake of being sure about the speeds, a test was done using ATTO which also confirms the Crystal Disk Mark results and shows off the blazing fast speeds that the company has promised.
Software
Western Digital has also released a dashboard that helps to monitor and do certain functions to the SSD. The interface is really simple to use with all the functions that you can perform on the drive easily accessible, the home page shows off graphs that tell you about the storage capacity and there is even a section to tell you the lifespan of the SSD.
I have been transferring and deleting files countless times and it still manages to stay at 100% health. Based on that, it is quite safe to say that the drive will last a very long time before you can even see the percentage drop but everyone will use the drive different so the performance might vary slightly.
Other than that, there is also options to upgrade the firmware of the drive, safely wipe the drive and even the option to make it into a bootable drive if need be. I highly recommend that this software is downloaded regardless if you own a 3D NAND SSD or a regular SSD especially if you are going to be storing sensitive and valuable data.
