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Comparison Products
We’re looking at three classes of drives today. The first includes high-end PCIe 4.0 “budget” drives, which include the TLC-based Inland TN470 and the QLC-based Biwin NV7200. There are drives that can saturate the interface for maximum bandwidth potential. The mid-grade options are closer to the 5 GB/s mark and include the proprietary Samsung 990 EVO, WD Black SN770, and WD Blue SN580. Non-proprietary drives in this section are the Addlink S91 and Patriot P400. These are drives that are clearly faster than PCIe 3.0 options, but may use older flash, as that’s all that’s needed to hit these speeds. Lastly, there’s the TeamGroup NV5000, a PCIe 3.0 drive in a PCIe 4.0 disguise, which is probably closer to where buyers might think the Green SN3000 would fall. One thing that helps the Green SN3000 stand out here is its newer flash, which is why it surprises.
Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark
Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.
Right off the bat, we think the Green SN3000 will surprise some people. Its 3DMark performance is quite good, beating the popular Black SN770 and punching near decent TLC-based drives like the TN470. It is more than adequate for games and, in fact, it should deliver an excellent experience with solid improvement over Gen 3 drives.
Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark
PCMark 10 is an industry-standard trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.
The Green SN3000 fares even better in PCMark 10. Its competition isn’t super stiff, but clearing other drives in its performance range like the 990 EVO and Black SN770 is a massive win. If you thought a WD Green SSD couldn’t make it as a primary drive, the results here should have you reconsidering. This drive is exceptionally responsive for one that uses QLC flash.
Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers
The PlayStation 5 is capable of an additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.
Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.
The Green SN3000 is limited in the PS5 because it cannot saturate the full PCIe 4.0 interface. Does this matter? In some edge cases, yes, but if your goal is to have a drive for games with minimal difference in load times, this will get the job done. Which is just as well since spending current SSD dollars on something high-end for the PS5 is a luxury. There’s also the added benefit of this drive not needing a heatsink, which could save you some extra money, too.
Transfer Rates — DiskBench
We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.
The Green SN3000 cannot reach the throughput heights of the full-fledged Gen 4 drives – the NV7200 and TN470 – but it is best among the mid-range ones. This is very good performance and makes the drive suitable as a secondary or storage drive in your system. We caution that large writes or ones made when the drive is fuller may suffer, so check our Write Saturation section to see how it handles the worst-case.
Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark
ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.
Ignoring the anomalous results at 4MiB – we’re not sure what caused this bug, but it isn’t real-world – the Green SN3000 performs as expected in ATTO. No real weak spots aside from a small dip at 512KiB. Its maximum or plateau performance level at higher block sizes is not as good as the NV7200 or TN470, which is to be expected given the sequential performance specifications. We’re specifically interested in the read performance as it is more indicative of real-world workloads for most users. Sequential write performance, which also maps to CDM’s results, is more disappointing, but the drive still beats the Blue SN580, which has been an incredibly popular entry-level drive.
But we’re all here to see the random 4K read results, right? That has always been the marker for real-world feel. We think people underestimate the value of sequential read performance, especially for game load times, but it’s undeniable that 4K random read performance is the most important metric for a consumer drive. SSDs are supposed to feel slick and responsive. It just so happens that the Green SN3000 returns fantastic results for this, and we do have an explanation.
It’s using BiCS8 flash, which has the lowest latency of all flash we’ve tested, even as QLC rather than TLC. In its pSLC mode – and recent or often-used data can reside in pSLC if the controller deems it worthy – it’s just as fast as the TLC variant found on the SanDisk WD Black SN7100 or SanDisk Optimus SN7100. Latency won’t be quite as good because the controller and flash are running at a lower transfer rate, which is why this drive maxes out at 5 GB/s rather than 7+ GB/s. However, it’s still lightning fast, and even 4K write latency is good enough to stay in contention. Simply put, the Green SN3000 is a potential sleeper.
Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery
Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, the process of migrating data out of the cache to free up space for further incoming data.
We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states including the steady state write performance.
The weakest point for any QLC-based drive is its sustained write performance. QLC drives usually have massive pSLC caches to mask weak performance of the underlying flash. Larger caches, once depleted, make the native performance even worse because the drive struggles to handle incoming writes while freeing up the necessary space. This is because pSLC is only one byte for every four bytes of QLC, and sooner or later, that becomes a problem.
The drive’s pSLC performance isn’t exactly inspiring, either, with writes around 4.44 GB/s. This lasts over 50 seconds, so the cache is around 222GB. This isn’t quite the maximum possible – one-fourth of the flash would be over 250GB – and this matches the scheme that WD and SanDisk use on other drives like the Optimus SN7100. Basically, it’s assumed there is some static cache and a lot of dynamic cache, but some space is left free to improve sustained write performance. Static cache is useful for small, bursty, random writes, while the dynamic cache helps carry longer writes. At least in theory – the Green SN3000 falls flat on its face once the cache runs out.
In this so-called folding mode, which is when the controller must write data from pSLC to QLC, performance drops to just over 200 MB/s. This is very slow and slower than many hard drives. It’s hard to avoid this because QLC flash is slower, and this is using only a four-channel controller. For some, this is a dealbreaker, and we understand that. For most users, this should not be a huge issue, but it’s definitely a significant weak point. Coupled with the low maximum write performance, we would not recommend this drive for any write-heavy roles. Such roles could include anything from use as caching for NAS to the drive’s use in an external enclosure, places where prolonged writes or writes with a very full drive are going to be detrimental to QLC flash performance.
Power Consumption and Temperature
We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features so we show the worst-case for idle.
Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.
For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.
WD’s and SanDisk’s mid-range SSD have been popular budget options and, to be more specific, are popular choices for laptops. Laptops benefit from lithe, power-efficient drives as these fit better, cool better, and dent battery life less. To compete in this space, the Green SN3000 would have to be power-efficient, and thankfully, it is. Since the drive is still using SanDisk’s proprietary controller technology, the gains mostly come from the flash. BiCS8 has proven to be incredibly efficient – largely due to its architectural changes – and this means the Green SN3000 is more efficient than the older Blue SN580 and Black SN770. That’s another big win.
In our testing, the drive hit a maximum of 67°C, which, while not cool, is also not very hot for a modern SSD. These SSDs don’t throttle until about 90°C, so there is plenty of headroom here. The design of the drive is also perfect for adding a basic heatspreader, low-profile heatsink, or thermal padding for use in laptops, enclosures, HTPCs, portable systems, and more. This is because the distance between the controller and flash package is large enough that the thermal equilibrium point would be within the range of both components, and there would be more surface area for heat dissipation. Even without any of that, this drive should be fine to operate, as-is, in almost any system.
Test Bench and Testing Notes
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We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.
WD Green SN3000 Bottom Line
The WD Green SN3000 is a strange drive in many ways. It’s still called the WD Green SN3000 despite SanDisk taking over SSDs and renaming them recently. That’s because it’s an OEM drive meant for prebuilts. However, you can get it from their site and others like Newegg, although be careful of the price. Normally, we would not dive too deeply into an OEM drive, but this is not a typical situation. Luckily, there is nothing keeping you from buying this drive if you want. We think that OEM drives that were once overlooked will become more popular as worldwide SSD stock dwindles. We will be reviewing more SSDs like this over time. Given those conditions, we feel this drive deserves a decent score to reflect where it fits right now.
The other part that’s strange – in the sense that we didn’t expect these results – is that WD’s Green SSDs have a pretty bad reputation. There are reasons for that reputation. The first is that the line has a weak warranty and, specifically, low write endurance. The second is that hardware swaps in the past have nerfed the drive into being a glorified USB drive at times, at least for the SATA models. This has caused the Green SN3000 to be overlooked when, in reality, it’s a pretty good drive. In fact, it’s basically a speed-limited Blue SN5100, which means that in everyday use, it could almost trade blows with the Black SN7100. This is because your workloads run in the pSLC cache most of the time and don’t even notice the QLC flash. On top of that, you rarely need more than about 5 GB/s of sequential performance, so it's not a bad trade-off.
The biggest problem, without a doubt, is that its sustained write performance is pretty terrible. This is nothing new for a QLC drive. We think it’s easy to overlook this, given how well it performs on our benchmarks. It’s certainly a great budget drive, and low endurance is hardly a real problem in practice. The BiCS8 flash is pretty solid in terms of reliability, especially with SanDisk’s proprietary controller, and its random read performance is excellent. The real concern is probably pricing and availability – what else is new? – but if you can be swift in picking one up with a good price, you’re getting a real diamond in the rough.
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