WD Black SN850X vs Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus SSD Comparison

[Music] hello and welcome back and that is right today we want to return to the subject of ssds and comparing against the brand new wd black x sn850x in summer of 2022 i'm slowly but surely comparing it against what i consider to be the top tier pcie gen 4 ssds in the market right now and i've compared a bunch of others and today is the turn of this this is the sobrint rocket 4 plus it's one of my favorite pcie gen 4 ssds for a multitude of reasons and in today's video i want to help you decide which one's best suited to your needs because it's really important to understand that neither one of these is actually the best each one of them has its strengths in different areas and that's really going to make a difference to how you want to use it to put into perspective maybe you're a post-production video editor who you're looking at photos looking at video and you need something that can withstand 4k and 8k performing media that you want to edit on the fly or you're a pc user and maybe you want to use an os drive or you want to play a little bit of zone constantly just for your own casual needs or scale up to being an esports professional or you're streaming your content on your twitch followed subs etc maybe you're a ps5 user and you want to know which one's best for that particular architecture or for a whole larger system you're using it as a caching or a scratch disk all of those situations require very very different kinds of drives with strengths in different areas in terms of performance durability and overall sustained performance so today's video i'm going to help you decide if you're one of those different users whether you should go for the subreddit rocket 4 plus or go for the wd black sn850x but before we go any further it was reminding you that this is not the only wd blank sn850 indeed it's the second the first one is this the sn850 arrived in 2020 the x version arrived in 2022 two years of difference between them now when the original 850 arrived in the market of autumn 2020 it was largely unopposed by anyone but maybe samsung it was one of the first 7 000 megabytes per second performing pcie gen4 commercial ssds hell of a title right but in the two years since it was released lots of other brands have either utilized third-party um r d uh components from companies like faison and micron or develop their own ssds to challenge the original wd there and in that two year period between each of these wd black ssds things changed and one of the most standout examples is the sabrint this plucky little brand and i say little they're not so little anymore that normally you associated with um docking stations cases and adapters suddenly are really ripping the world apart when it comes to um ssd memory storage docking stations thunderbolt and more and they've evolved exceedingly rapidly but of all of their products the one that i think that gets the most heat and the most attention is the rocket plus series here so in today's video we're comparing now the older ssd versus the newer wd black there now we're going to be looking at price we can look at value we're going to look at performance sustain performance durability and hopefully help you decide which one's best suited to your needs now let's crack on with that first one there the old change which one of these is better for the money now real quick when it comes to the actual cost and the actual price tag this one wins it's just the more affordable drive of the two indeed because it's been around in the market longer much like the wd black sn850 originally have been in the market for that two year period the sprint rocket four plus has had a lot of time to make itself available and to be far more adjusting with its price tag now we will go into more detail about this later on but the sabrint ssd is actually made of components for about two or three different brands sk hynix for its nand uh for its um onboard memory micron for the nand and physon for the controller the wd on the other hand is almost exclusively in house now that often means that the in-house drive because they control development it normally means that can make it a little bit cheaper because everything is using in-house brands in the case of wd that sandisk and coaxer and all of their in-house manufacturing of all of those components but the time this is spent in the market regardless of its high performance and recent upgrades to its architecture i'll talk about later on it has managed to maintain a better price point there on each of its storage tiers there so not only does it manage to be the better priced drive of the two it even sneaks just under the radar with being better value now by that that value comes down to several factors because normally the one that uses in-house components would be cheaper but this manages to rely on fison micron and sk hynix with dwd relying on its own in-house development for the most part and it still manages to be cheaper even when it's using before i drop it on the floor um that in-house design and still manages to be cheaper indeed on top of that in terms of design it's worth highlighting that this drive also has a heat shield that's not just a label there on the top both sides of this ssd have got a metallic heat shield covering all of the components if you check out my review on this drive from mid last year you can do my full strip down of it there where i show you all the components as well as the reviews linked in the description there the w back on the other hand uses the normal kind of paper label there on the top and this being the 2tb model it is blank there on the other side in the case of the sabrin the sabrin is double-sided at the 2 and 4 tb limit there but while we're talking about storage it's worth talking about something else capacity both of these drives have gone a slightly different way in terms of storage capacity overall now rewinding time back to that sn 850 from 2020 when it arrived on the scene it arrived in a 500 gig 1tb and 2tb modeled there so we could yeah three configurations there in terms of capacity now at the time it was super expensive pcie gen 4 was super new and a lot of motherboards actually had a 2tb limit fast forward to 2022 however and people's tastes and the price per terabyte for most drives has come down consequently people are a little bit more demanding there so the wd black foregoed the 500 gig model there starting at the 1tb in 2022 and a 2tb and a 4tb model there and again with the price rising per capacity but as you get to the higher capacities you generally found that the price per terabyte dropped a few dollars there now sabrin didn't exactly put their feet up when it arrived on the scene it arrived in a one a two and a four tb model there with nan distribution across the whole board at around 1 tb per nand module on the actual pcb they're on board but about three months ago uh sabrin and the rocket four plus and managed to be the first and to my knowledge still the only pcie gen 4 commercial grade ssd that takes advantage of tlc nand very important that can reach eight terabytes there is an eight tb model of this it doesn't increase the length it doesn't go to a two two one uh two two one one zero length it remains two two eight zero but an eight tb model of this now not cheap 8 tb of super fast 7000 megs ssd knocks you back about 14 199 but it's still an enormous capacity to be available there and again the only brand that manages to include an atb model in its lineup has to be applauded there the performance does dip ever so slightly and we will talk a little bit about that in a moment but fair play to them including that capacity there now when we talk about performance on these drives before we get to the performance itself in terms of traditional transfer rates and uh randomized um iops there with as many quick operations as possible let's take a moment to discuss their architecture because that's going to be really really important there and i mentioned the wd black has got in-house architecture now we're still waiting for confirmation on the controller and the nand precisely at the time of recording and the reason for that is that wd have always been very clouded about their hardware components there gets very hard even with the model ids you know within the first three to six months to find out more until real precise digging has been done on the architecture and it's very proprietary and very closed book but we ascertain that the controller on board tbc is the wd black g2 nvme controller there and again built on a sandisk and wd partnership there alongside the nand on board being 3d tlc nand we're still waiting for confirmation if it's one one four layer or 162 layer i believe there a lot of people are kind of agreed that it's one one four layer nand there but it's still very good quality now in there and again as mentioned one tb chips on the 4tb being double-sided there so some nice architecture that is combined with between 1 and 2 gig of ddr4 memory on board there and it's pcie um gen four times four uh architecture on an nvme 1.4 um revision there so again with five years of warranty great architecture there comparable to that of its predecessor with an improvement on the nandi and many many many firmware updates in those two years of release there to improve the drive further now the sprint is very similar it's nvme 1.4 it's pci gen four times four three dtlc nand however it now runs on 176 layer nand there now bear in mind that is a recent update so we are talking the last five months give or take so if you buy one of these ssds and it was manufactured prior to that point you will be running on 96 layer nand which is still damn good but 176 layer nand allows a better performance and in some cases depending on your utilization better durability as well but again it's a very negligible term there now that architecture of 176 layer um 3d tlc noun from micron mean that the architecture of that nand is a tremendous boom to this drive overall there it takes advantage of between one and four gig of sk hyena x um ddr4 there and the firezone e18 controller has seen a myriad of firmware updates over time but don't forget that the fry's only 18 controller obviously because it's a third pipe component that's used by many many many many ssd brands in 2022 it needs to be a lot more open in its architecture for good of a bad the wd black on the other hand having an in-house controller that's used by a very small spectrum of ssds in-house can be a lot more targeted can be a lot more precise in its architecture to its end utilization now how does that translate in terms of performance well straight off the back i can tell you that for the most part in terms of traditional megabytes per second read write of sequential data so big blocky chunky data the sprint wins it doesn't win everything and there are times depending on the capacity you go for there that the wd wins but overall on points this drive wins a lot of the time that winning is not the read speed however it's the right speed with 6850 reported uh officially by sabrin on their drive and 6600 reported on the wd when it comes to the read performance there's a lot of back and forth now the previous iteration before the 176 layer nand came in was seven thousand seven thousand one hundred that improvement on the nand has brought it up to seven thousand three hundred leveling the playing field between them so again it will depend on which generation of drive you go for and if you are a gamer and not streaming and not doing any kind of multi-purpose use all you're going to care about is the read pc organic pc or ps5 gamer the read is what matters but if you're a content creator if you're a streamer or using a production or caching right place a substantial part there and that is when that right performance is going to matter to you because that increased right and that leveraging of the pcie gen four times four bandwidth there is going to be very important to you because you are running processes where although read is always going to have a part you don't want to be bottlenecked in the other direction in any way and particularly when you're doing mixed utilization there as well regardless of 50 50 60 40 70 30 or whatever now moving away from that we can go to the very other end of the spectrum iot traditionally measured in 4k random ielts this is basically the smallest operation you can perform randomly across the disk unlike those traditional transfer that i just mentioned just now though a big blocky data that's all in a row or in a line 4k random is about showing how many individual operations these drives can perform per second and that is when 4k operations are being pulled randomly from all of the nand now between the two of these it's the wd 100 in terms of 4k random iops they have absolutely nailed it now i don't know if it's because of the nand improvements i don't know if it's because the controller is so fantastically geared in the way that i mentioned but this drive cracks the one million iops in read and write really really early hitting a height of 1.2 million read iops and 1.1 million right iops there the best this drive does is around about the 800 to close to a million depending on the um situation you're booting it within and again i do believe a lot of that is down to that controller being a little bit more open in its utility and the wwe controller being a lot more precise so as mentioned when it comes to traditional performance the sabrin wins on points when it comes to 4k random and no and again this is where caching users scratch disk users and database users are going to prefer the wd because it absolutely storms it in that regard now how you utilize drive on day one may change over time but ultimately most users are not just going to have to super fast drive and use it yeah every now and then most users go for a high performance drive because they're trying to save time money energy loading times and one way or another it's going to be running quite a long time that's why drives like these arrive with only five years of manufacturer's warranty but ratings known as dwpd or tbw drive rights per day or terabytes written because you may not be aware unlike traditional hard drives which rely on mechanical parts moving inside and since these have no moving parts so they're silent what they do utilize is electricity and nand wears away over time the more you write on it more regularly you write on it the more that durability just starts to dip but if you go down to the t and c of most ssd manufacturers what you find at the bottom is they go oh it's five years of warranty but also x number of thousand hours powered on or x number of uh of write operations the sort of information that can be obtained with uh applications such as crystal disk and adding the ssd to your pc install crystal disk and it will tell you exactly how many hours it's been powered on and exactly how much right operations have happened to it so all of this information can be gleaned from them and overall it's how they work out the durability durability isn't just how long it's going to take before the drive dies but it also works out how long it can maintain that performance point and if you exceed the recommended daily writes annual rights or whatever then it can lower that performance and that durability the drive may bottleneck itself due to heat and overall you end up with a drive failing you a little bit there so in terms of durability this drive wins it doesn't win by country miles but it does win now i'm not going to talk about meantime between failure it'd be really easy to do that but it's such an industry term mean time between failure is basically a drive running and then it fails on the next one that measurement there is your mean time between failure it's measured in millions of hours and frankly it doesn't really apply to most users outside of a very very select enterprise tier there most other users should pay attention to the terabytes written and drive rights per day now drivewrites per day is ultimately how much you can refresh and rewrite date on there so in the case of the wd it is rated at 0.3 drive rights per day what that means is for every terabyte you can fresh write 300 gigabytes on there and that means if you were to delete data and refresh on there as long as you don't exceed 300 gigs within that five year period of the one of every one tb you'll be absolutely fine and they say it will work within those margins it will probably work continued afterwards but they'd recommend to stay within those margins now the sabrine is between 0.38 and 0.4 depending on the capacity you look at there it's not a big increase but it's definitely an increase and it results in slightly larger around about 380 to 400 gig out of every terabyte being daily written and still remain within the confines of the warranty and the performance now another way this is measured is terabytes written which is an annual workload figure and then you find each tier that the wd is i believe 150 300 600 1200 2400 and the sabrin is going the other way they're peaking at the 8tb model at 6 000 terabytes written or six petabytes there so again terabytes written is largely the same normally at every um tier that's why i try to rely on driver drive rights per day but overall when it comes to durability of sustained performance the sebring wins by a hair's breath there at the end so summarizing it here which one of these drives is best for which user now if you're a console user particularly a ps5 user i would go for the sabrin out of these two because the wd black sn850x is a more expensive drive and its improvements are mainly in the right operations over its predecessor something gamers aren't going to be able to take advantage of and if you are committed to the wd black brand and you want it for your console or your pc gaming and you're not doing pro streaming or pro gaming then go for the wd black sn850x if you already love wd but between these two definitely to spread rocket 4x uh four plus if you are a video editor i think there's a good chance you're gonna rely on the wd there not only because its right performance is better than its predecessor but a pinch lower than the spring but it's those iops there when you're dealing with scratch discs when you are dealing with portions and you're running a whole spectrum of a timeline with lots of bits and bobs there and after effects and text that's where the wd black will be more in its zone when it's pulling small shader effects and small bits of information from databases if you are a nas user and you want to use one of these drives for caching i would say the sabrin thanks to its higher durability factor there and the rewrite cycle of most cash drives if you are a pro streamer a programmer again i'm probably going to say the sabrin because the sprint drives there you are paying more for the wd black in a field where you may not take advantage of all of its advantages that are built into this latest upgrade drive and if you were looking at this for pro sports and gaming streaming i'd probably say to go for the wd black sn850 unless you are really pushing that drive otherwise in that field the supreme rocket four plus wins it for me and finally for a simple os drive either of them i think in an os drive windows mac whatever both of these drives deliver and i think unless you are running a substantially high architecture in your pc or mac system you're not going to be able to max one of these drives more than the other out in my domestic six core 12th gen i5 system with 16gb of ddr4 running windows 10 pro these drives were very similar in their read write performance it was only iops where things made a big difference that's not really somewhere in the uh traditional you know home user os you're going to feel those benefits but this has been the sprint rocket 4 plus versus the wd black sn850x they are both great ssds they are both very much in my top five maybe even top three but we'll have to wait and see on that one by the end of the year if you want to learn more about these drives there are links to all of my individual tests both pc and ps5 linked below as well as the comparison article that goes into way more detail about the specifications there's also the option to go down there and find out more in our free advice section as well as make suggestions on further comparisons in the future click like if you've enjoyed the video it genuinely helps me know what i'm doing right and doing wrong click subscribe if you want to learn more on this subject as we cover both of these ssds and more on the whole subject of data storage in 2022 moving forward and otherwise i will see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 4,522

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Id: OIyixTGFyuM

Length: 22min 23sec (1343 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 04 2022