For those not following the consumer SSD market closely, this is a bit of an upset. Previously, Samsung was king and basically unchallenged on price/performance for mainstream and high performance loads. Now we've got Western Digital, previously seen as a spinning rust king with an SSD side business, coming in and making an extremely competitive offering. While they're not strictly better, they're the best the market has seen from outside Korea or Intel.
If you want to quickly get the long-short of the review, check out the 'Destroyer' benchmark[0] and the price/gb chart[1]. Though I recommend reading the entire thing, anandtech reviews are a treat.
As a side note, WD bought SanDisk. While they had bought STEC before this, SanDisk brought scale and much larger engineering force. WD had a great brand, and these two things may work together for them.
Not to mention that Sandisk’s reliability and firmware was (is) a great measure better than Samsung’s - which has more than its share of problems and scandals.
In comparison to general processing, I haven't been keeping up with advancement in SSD/flash memory technology very much. Is the market still the cut-throat low margin hell hole I remember it being, or has technological improvement slowed to a point where performance gain is now much more difficult to achieve?
It's both, depending on the segment. The vast majority of SSD controllers can easily saturate the SATA bus, so there's not really much room for differentiation in 2.5"/M.2 SATA drives. But when you've got a PCIe-3 x4 bus to work with, as is the case for the NVMe drives being compared in this article, it's a whole different ball game. There the bottleneck is the controller (and to a much lesser extent, the flash itself). For a while Samsung was really the only game in town, as far as high-end performance goes, but it seems like WD has finally got a worthy competitor. Now it just remains to be seen how well the drives hold up (bad controller firmware can put up high performance numbers at the expense of the longevity of the flash (aka your data)).
The NAND industry went into a severe shortage (as NAND goes) along with DRAM. However, NAND shortage happened due to 2D to 3D. While 3D allows for high cell density, it also made Capex go from about 8B to around 25B as an industry. One of the reason Lam stock price has been on a tear. NAND spot pricing went up somewhere between 200-300% for like on like technology. Margins exploded, and the industry grew larger than any forecasts. There is a big debate on if the margins will stay high. While DRAM is still edging up, we may have seen some lowering of NAND pricing. So cost reduction is coming from mixing to MLC and TLC with better architectures in the same package.
It has stabilized into a modest margin business for the few big companies that dominate it. Very similar to how the HDD market did. Based on the margins Western Digital has been seeing lately, I'd say it's even more lucrative.
Western Digital almost has 20% operating income margins at this point, that's a notch below where Intel is typically at (25%-30%) and comparable to Cisco. Their latest two quarters saw them generate $1.85 billion in operating income on $10.5 billion in sales. Not bad.
Is this monopolistic/cartel-like in nature, or is purely due to the costs of capital expenditures for research and development? Also, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle.
Samsung supports AES-256 hardware encryption on pretty much all their drives I don't see that on these WD / Sandisk products that is kind of a deal breaker for me.
Personally, I now prefer to do crypto using FOSS software, even if it means a CPU performance hit. Who knows which crypto library is being used with hardware? I had certainly never heard of Infineon's RSALib before CVE-2017-15361 caused me to have to revoke one of my RSA keys that was generated on a Yubikey.
Now I'm not one to go quoting ESR, but it's essentially because FOSS crypto software is widely used and has had a lot of eyeballs on it. Clearly that doesn't grant it immunity from bugs, but given my recent experiences, I'm a lot less trusting of hardware manufacturers to get crypto right.
I'm familiar with the sentiment but there are numerous high profile CVE's in the past decade that persisted in FOSS for long periods despite wide use and many eyes. The only hardware one I'm aware of is the YubiKey.
I think we agree that the many eyes maxim isn't as big of a factor as some might make it out to be, perhaps it's more of a "the devil you know" situation. With hardware there isn't a lot of transparency around the implementations that are used, so it just makes me feel uncertain. I'd rather throw my lot in with OpenSSL and GPG than unknown library X.
Also, it wasn't just Yubico products that were impacted by the vulnerability. It was estimated that 25% of all TPM devices globally were impacted, which adds up to millions of smartcards.
One annoying thing is that Samsung NVMe drives do not support the things that would allow Microsoft Bitlocker to use the drive's hardware encryption and just manage the keys.
It's quite surprising if WD does not have the build-in encryption(). Typically the secure erase on the drives is using this. For example on Samsung the data is always encrypted and doing a secure erase means just generating new encryption key and removing the old one. On SSD this is pretty crucial, because you can't wipe the contents by just writing random stuff on drive. The drive is managing the writes (wear leveling algorithms) and might not actually overwrite existing data.
() Of course it is be possible that they have this internally, but just don't expose the password part to user. Could not see anything on the specs on quick search.
It doesn't say it does on the spec and doesn't have a PSID printed on the label in the photo which are two strong indicators that it doesn't support it.
So you run without OS level FDE and trust a drive level crypto function? How does key management work, do you input the AES key at a firmware prompt on boot / wake from sleep, or is there transparent OS support for this?
If you are talking about a drive following the TCG OPAL spec there is typically a Data Encryption Key (DEK) and an Access Key. The DEK is generated in the drive and never leaves it. The DEK is encrypted with the access key that the user specifies. sedutil is an open source project that works with these drives it is OS agnostic.
On laptops with an FDE disk, there's a password prompt on bootup (not wakeup from suspend to RAM - possibly configurable) before you can do anything else with the machine. Seen on Dell E models and Thinkpad T models.
Sounds like it's pretty easy to compromise this kind of encryption if you steal a laptop that's suspended [1].
One of the easiest attacks mentioned is to just keep the drive powered and plug the sata data port into another computer.
Another risk is that you don't know if the crypto is secure. There are lots of possibilities to get things wrong [2].
It seems inevitable that the further you get from end-to-end crypto, the less secure it is.
None of the scenarios detailed in your 1st reference are an inherent vulnerability of SEDs it is describing vulnerabilities in the software that drives the SEDs or physical designs of the computers they are installed in. Also, reset attacks apply to software encryption as well as SED's.
Check out the sedutil project on Github it's an opensource implementation of software to manage SED's
Good to see Western Digital will stay relevant. After years of buying their products I was concerned they'd fade into obscurity without a viable SSD product.
Conner got absorbed by Seagage. Micropolis rebranded and went bankrupt. Maxtor got sponged up by Western Digital. Hard to bet on a horse that lasts.
HGST won't be with us for much longer either due to the recent WD rebranding [1][2].
As part of the unification of our new Western Digital brand, the Ultrastar DC HC320 is being introduced under the Western Digital Data Center (DC) segment branding.
All new commercial and enterprise products going forward will carry this new Western Digital branding as we transition away from the HGST brand. Western Digital has gone through a significant transformation with the integration of multiple companies. Moving to the Western Digital brand for all of our commercial and enterprise products is the first step in unifying the brands in our portfolio.
Interesting, if you check the leadership at WD, virtually all of them came from HGST. (President, CFO, COO, etc.) This was a case where the acquiring company became the acquired, and they moved their headquarters from SoCal to NorCal, the ultimate signal of who won the internal war. Once they bought SanDisk, a lot of the SanDisk people moved to Micron. Finally, some key notable players from WD moved to Seagate. The industry has been musical chairs.
Does this mean that the "WD Data Center" marque will be the indication, going forward, that a drive has the reliability ratings that Backblaze et al regularly see out of currently-HGST-branded drives?
Fromn the early 2000s until they left the HDD market, Samsung (then still a bit of an underdog) drives were among the best: most quiet, no performance degradation over time (others had that), high reliability. I had a few of them.
I'm not intimately familiar with the various players in the storage market, but as an outsider I would guess that Western Digital must be doing alright. They could have, but didn't, break up the price-fixing ruling that market and taken it over handily if need be. Amazing that in 2018 it's still more expensive to get data storage on a dumb grid of NAND gates built out of common materials than it is to get it on hard drives infused with helium, sporting a high precision high speed motor, platters coated with rare materials, neodymium magnets, and, coming soon, lasers!
> Amazing that in 2018 it's still more expensive to get data storage on a dumb grid of NAND gates built out of common materials than it is to get it on hard drives infused with helium, sporting a high precision high speed motor, platters coated with rare materials, neodymium magnets, and, coming soon, lasers!
And the heads, those are incredibly tiny works of art.
All those things are still easier/cheaper in CapEx than new lithographic process nodes.
Which has always been true: ever since the discovery of semiconductors, nothing in tech has ever been more capital-intensive than the R&D and working-up of a new fab that can put out smaller-nanometer—or in this case, many-more-layered—circuits.
It's just that now, process nodes are something that apply to storage, too.
SSDs are trouncing hard drives in capacity, though. AFAIK, they currently top out at 30TB in the 2.5in form factor and 100TB in the 3.5in form factor. (I'm not sure what the current top end is for other form factors but they're probably remarkably high, too.) Of course, prices for these units are also way up there.
Yup, it's hard to get rid of spinning rust unless you want to spend 10x the cost. While we don't have a good future in the sport car market (SSDs), we are truly the good guys are storing lots of stuff cheap on a cent/GB level. Basically we're semi-truck and our future is the cloud. An overview of the hard drive mission and tech we're working on presented at OCP by your's truly and my roadmap buddy.
Lasers are dead. DOA, at least according to WD. Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) is the next thing for rust. WD plans to start shipping MAMR drives in 2019.
Durability will be the test. I've one data point, but I've had 6 SSDs, most from Crucial, used for developer-desktop work (VMs etc) and as well as regular file corruption via 'bad sectors' (didn't think those were standard on an SSD due to its error checking) they've failed more regularly than any hard drive ever did, even the ones thrown around in laptops.
I am seriously considering paying double for an Intel SSD next time, as I understand they are less likely to fail.
Is that a Crucial M4? I had mine replaced 3 times due to sector corruption as well, and then trashed it. It also had a bug where it would break after ~5200 hours of use.
OTOH, I never had an issue with my Intel or Samsung SSDs, even with heavier use.
I agree with you that reliability is key, and it bugs me that reviews still mostly look at speed and price.
Mostly MX100's of varying sizes. The one that's currently doing sector corruption is a MX300 750GB, and the "Too good to be true" new price on Amazon (in a sale) should've been a warning.
The rationality would depend on what you need, wouldn't it?
If you have a nice, stable place to work, you can optimize for that. Big high-resolution monitors, nice sound system, great keyboard, several pointing devices to switch between: these go well with desktops.
If you move around frequently, or don't have much space, that constrains your choices.
The Intel use more power than two or three of the others combined in some tests. You gotta be pretty desperate for Intel fanboy-respect or having a very niche usage to buy one over a Samsung IMO.
Even if Intel products are bad, using terms like "pretty desperate for Intel fanboy-respect" do not exactly signal a mature and impartial view of the market.
That's a little disingenuous. Intel's 700 series SSD does not have anomalously high power. The Optane SSD, based on a completely different technology, has power consumption that is higher but is the top performer in many other metrics.
The recent 700 series drive from Intel—the 760p—is pretty good in terms of power consumption. The older 750 was, like the Optane 900P, a large power-hungry card based on their enterprise SSDs and never intended to be used in mobile systems. Intel has on many occasions re-purposed their enterprise SSD tech to make a premium SSD for the consumer market, but that strategy has some downsides.
The difference between this drive and Optane isn't huge. It is faster on a lot of benchmarks, competitive on others, and only is behind on two latency tests.
The biggest bottleneck in the current form factor is the OS which is why the Optane can match a ram drive in latency.
Once Optane DIMMs will hit the market or once a dedicated access protocol will be developed for low latency non volatile storage will be developed and the OS won’t be as much of a bottleneck it would be much more useful.
If you want to quickly get the long-short of the review, check out the 'Destroyer' benchmark[0] and the price/gb chart[1]. Though I recommend reading the entire thing, anandtech reviews are a treat.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12543/the-western-digital-wd-... [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12543/the-western-digital-wd-...