New WD Blue SSD Switches To NVMe
by Billy Tallis on March 14, 2019 9:00 AM EST
In the process of assimilating SanDisk, Western Digital has been re-using their hard drive branding on consumer SSDs: WD Green, Blue and Black can refer to either mechanical hard drives or SSDs. The WD Blue brand is used for the most mainstream products, which for SSDs meant SATA drives. The first WD Blue SSD introduced in 2016 used planar TLC NAND and a Marvell controller with the usual amount of DRAM for a mainstream SSD. The next year, the WD Blue was updated with 3D TLC NAND that kept it competitive with the Crucial MX series and Samsung 850 EVO. 2018 passed with no changes to the WD Blue hardware, but prices were slashed to keep up with the rest of the industry: the 1TB drive that debuted with a MSRP of $310 is now selling for $120.
SanDisk's 64-layer 3D TLC NAND is nearing the end of its product cycle, but they and other NAND flash manufacturers aren't in a hurry to switch over to 96L NAND, so it's not quite time for another straightforward refresh of the WD Blue. Instead, Western Digital has chosen to migrate the WD Blue brand over to a different market segment. Now that the WD Black is well-established as a high-end NVMe product, there's room for an entry-level NVMe SSD, and it will be the new WD Blue SN500. This is little more than a re-branding of an existing OEM product (WD SN520), in the same way that the current WD Black SN750 SSD is based on the WD SN720. The SN520 was announced more than a year ago, but as an OEM product we were unable to obtain a review sample. Like the high-end SN720 and SN750, the SN520 and WD Blue SN500 use Western Digital's in-house NVMe SSD controller architecture, albeit in a cut-down implementation with just two PCIe lanes and no DRAM interface. The high-end version of this controller architecture has proven to be very competitive (especially for a first-generation product), but so far we have only the SN500's spec sheet by which to judge the low-end controller.
| WD Blue SN500 Specifications | ||||
| Capacity | 250 GB | 500 GB | ||
| Form Factor | M.2 2280 Single-Sided | |||
| Interface | NVMe PCIe 3 x2 | |||
| Controller | Western Digital in-house | |||
| NAND | SanDisk 64-layer 3D TLC | |||
| DRAM | None (Host Memory Buffer not supported) | |||
| Sequential Read | 1700 MB/s | 1700 MB/s | ||
| Sequential Write | 1300 MB/s | 1450 MB/s | ||
| 4KB Random Read | 210k IOPS | 275k IOPS | ||
| 4KB Random Write | 170k IOPS | 300k IOPS | ||
| Power | Peak | 5.94 W | 5.94 W | |
| PS3 Idle | 25 mW | 25 mW | ||
| PS4 Idle | 2.5 mW | 2.5 mW | ||
| Endurance | 150 TB | 300 TB | ||
| Warranty | 5 years | |||
| MSRP | $54.99 (22¢/GB) |
$77.99 (16¢/GB) |
||
High-end client/consumer NVMe SSDs all use PCIe 3.0 x4 interfaces, but the entry-level NVMe market is split between four-lane and two-lane controllers. Two-lane controllers are generally cheaper and their smaller size makes them attractive for small form factor devices that can't fit a full 22x80mm M.2 card. The WD SN520 is a 22x30mm design that is also available in 42mm and 80mm card lengths, but the retail WD Blue SN500 will only be sold in the 80mm length that is most common for consumer M.2 drives.
The switch from SATA to NVMe means the new WD Blue SN500 will offer much higher peak performance, but the use of a DRAMless controller means there may be some corner cases where heavy workloads show little improvement or even regress in performance. The SN500's controller does not use the NVMe Host Memory Buffer, but does include an undisclosed amount of memory on-board that serves a similar purpose. This means that omitting the external DRAM from the drive should not have as severe a performance impact as it does for DRAMless SATA drives like the WD Green SSD.
Even if the new WD Blue SN500 succeeds at offering far better performance than the current WD Blue SATA SSD, it will still be a big step backward in terms of capacity: the SATA product line ranges from 250GB to 2TB, but the SN500 will only be offered in 250GB and 500GB capacities. We hope that Western Digital has an upgraded WD Green in the works to keep affordable 1TB+ drives in their portfolio.
The MSRPs for the WD Blue SN500 are a few dollars higher than current retail pricing for the mainstream SATA SSDs they are intended to succeed. Western Digital has not mentioned when the SN500 will hit the shelves, but there will probably not be much delay after today's announcement, since this hardware has been shipping to OEMs for a year already.
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abufrejoval - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
Thanks for the feedback. Took the opportunity to find and read your piece on the HMB from last June.I’ve tested FusionIO drives when they came out with 160GB of SLC and in fact I still operate a 2.4TB eMLC unit in one of my machines (similar performance levels as a 970Pro, but “slightly” higher energy consumption).
Those had a much “fatter” HMB design and in fact operated most of their "firmware" as OS drivers on the host, including all mapping tables. The controller FPGA would only run the "analog" parts, low level flash chip writing, reading and erasure with all their current adjustments, including also perhaps some of the ECC logic.
Of course, you couldn’t boot these and on shutdown all these maps would be saved on a management portion of the device. But on a power failure they could be reconstructed from the write journal and full scans of status bits and translation info on the data blocks.
That approach was ok for their data center use and it helped them attain performance levels that nobody else could match—at least at the time, because massive server CPUs are difficult to beat even with today’s embedded controllers.
It also allowed for a higher performance “native” persistent block interface that eliminated most of the typical block layer overhead: Facebook is rumored to have motivated and used that interface directly for some years.
NVMe has eliminated much of the original overhead yet following the same reasoning which puts smartNIC logic as eBPF into kernel space on Linux, you could argue that you could follow a similar approach for SSDs, where a kernel would load safe eBPF type code from the SSD to manage the translation layer, wear management and SLC to xLC write journal commits....
Didn’t I even read about some Chinese DC startup doing that type of drive?
With a split between CPU and RAM across PCIe x4 HBM seems borderline usable, especially since the buffers can both be denied and reclaimed by the host. Translation table accesses via bus master from the SSD controller, with all that arbitration overhead and bandwidth limitations… I doubt it scales.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
HMB isn't meant to scale, it's meant to shave a dollar or two of the BOM of a low-end SSD.The modern successor to the Fusion-IO concept is the Open Channel SSD, for which there are a few competing standards as the industry tries to figure out the appropriate level of abstraction. Generally speaking, they all involve running most of the flash translation layer on the host CPU, while keeping the media-specific stuff (error correction) on the drive. But it's starting to look like before Open Channel SSDs can really catch on in the datacenter, NVMe protocol extensions will take care of most of the same use cases, by optionally exposing SSDs as zoned block devices analogous to SMR hard drives.
lightningz71 - Friday, March 15, 2019 - link
I’v Got to wonder if the advent of PCIe gen 5 will make HMB a much more usable thing for all but data center drives? On an NVME device, that can represent a 4 x improvement in data bandwidth between the sad and host memory. That throughput would easily exceed the data rates that current generation controllers are seeing that still use DDR3 in only one and two chip implementations on their PCBs. When you look at the expected capacity improvements expected with ddr5, having an SSD use even 2GB for HBM wouldn’t be a significant impact on the system.Granted, I’m talking about the consumer space where bleeding edge performance isn’t the name of the game. Pro level and big iron implementations will certainly want to use higher performance solutions.
icelava - Thursday, May 30, 2019 - link
Seems like the mainstream market does not want to favour a scenario for 2242 SSDs? I just ordered a Lenovo ThinkPad T480 and now am facing great difficultly sourcing for an NVMe SSD model with that dimension (probably B + M keys).