Flashing back to Zip drives, Ganesh TS is perplexed.
Western Digital unveiled the mouth-filling SanDisk Professional Pro-Blade modular SSD ecosystem in mid-2022 to serve the needs of the professional market. The Pro-Blade family comprises of three product lines: compact and sturdy NVMe drives (Pro-Blade SSD Mags), a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20Gb/s) enclosure for the mags (Pro-Blade Transport), and a four-bay Thunderbolt enclosure (Pro-Blade Station) directly compatible with the mags. The mags are essentially M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs with a proprietary connector that directly exposes the internal PCIe Gen3 x4 interface, albeit with support for a higher number of mating cycles compared to the native M.2 2280 internal SSD one.
We’re taking a detailed look at the internals of the Pro-Blade SSD Mag and the Pro-Blade Transport enclosure, followed by a discussion of the results of putting the 2TB and 4TB combinations through a rigorous direct-attached storage performance evaluation routine.
Are we going mag?
The Pro-Blade SSD Mags are available in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities. The mags have a gumstick form factor. They are essentially a thermal cladding for an M.2 2280 NVMe SSD with a customised PCIe Gen3 x4 connector and provide a snug fit.
The enclosure has a stylish and solid feel to it, with the ridges on the side giving users additional traction. Western Digital utilises an ASMedia ASM2364 bridge chip under the thermal pad in the Transport enclosure’s board. The SSD Mag incorporates the Western Digital WD_Black SN750E M.2 2280 Gen3 x4 NVMe SSD with plenty of thermal paste ensuring good contact with the metal sides. This SSD uses an in-house SanDisk controller along with 3D TLC NAND (BiCS 4 96L 3D TLC) and DRAM for the flash translation layer.
Flash-based storage devices tend to slow down in unpredictable ways when subjected to a large number of small-sized random writes, though such workloads are uncommon for direct-attached storage devices, where workloads are largely sequential in nature.
