Western Digital launched the SanDisk Professional PRO-BLADE modular SSD ecosystem in mid-2022 to meet the needs of the professional market. The PRO-BLADE family includes three product lines – compact and rugged NVMe drives (PRO-BLADE SSD Mags), USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 (20 Gbps) enclosures for Mags (PRO-BLADE TRANSPORT) and four-bay Thunderbolt enclosures ( PRO-BLADE STATION) is directly compatible with magazines. These Mags are essentially M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs with a custom connector that directly exposes the internal PCIe Gen3 x4 interface, albeit supporting more plug cycles than native M.2 2280 internal SSDs.
The PRO-BLADE ecosystem is targeted at professionals involved in multi-user/multi-site workflows in the content acquisition industry. A typical use case involves transporting the SSD Mag in the enclosure on site. Different team members can have their own TRANSPORT enclosures where SSD Mags can be hot-swapped. PRO-BLADE STATION’s central location is capable of ingesting data from multiple SSD magnets at higher speeds (Thunderbolt 3) than 20 Gbps TRANSPORT enclosures.
Western Digital sampled several PRO-BLADE SSD Mag and TRANSPORT enclosures for evaluation. This review details the internals of the PRO-BLADE SSD Mag and PRO-BLADE TRANSPORT chassis, then discusses the results of the 2TB and 4TB combinations through our rigorous direct-attached storage performance evaluation routine. Before discussing the value proposition, we also examine the power consumption and thermal distribution of both configurations.
Introduction and product impressions
Portable storage drives have grown rapidly over the past decade. High-performance options are available in a variety of form factors for consumer and prosumer use cases. Large HDD-based storage arrays are often used to meet the requirements of content acquisition industry professionals. Advances in flash memory technology are also disrupting this area.
Vendors designing bus-powered flash-based direct-attached storage devices need to keep performance consistency, power consumption and pricing in mind. The ideal device would have high performance consistency (across longer stress periods and workload types), low power consumption, and low cost. In practice, there are trade-offs and different aspects of optimization depending on the target market segment. The content capture industry is sensitive to performance consistency. Pricing is usually not a major issue and power inefficiency is usually tolerated as long as performance is good.
Western Digital offers the PRO-BLADE SSD Mag, which can be purchased separately in capacities of 1TB, 2TB and 4TB. Users require a PRO-BLADE TRANSPORT cabinet or PRO-BLADE STATION to make storage capacity available to the host system. Users can also purchase one of four available PRO-BLADE TRANSPORT configurations (0TB empty case, or 1TB, 2TB or 4TB versions with a single PRO-BLADE SSD Mag of appropriate capacity).
PRO-BLADE SSD Mags are chewing gum shaped. They are essentially thermal wrappers for M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs with custom PCIe Gen3 x4 connectors. The connector easily fits into the receptacle of the TRANSPORT housing. The TRANSPORT 2TB package shown below includes 50 cm. USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 20 Gbps Type-C to Type-C Cable plus warranty guide and user guide.
Both the SSD Mag and TRANSPORT enclosures are held together by Torx screws and are easy to remove. The gallery below details the case and magazine design as well as its internals.
After removing the casing, the screws inside the casing are normal. Both parts of the TRANSPORT case are solid metal with good thermal paths (involving bridging thermal pads and raised metal blocks on the chip case).
The case has a sleek yet sturdy feel, and ridges on the sides provide users with extra traction. The recessed design of the fixed end of the SSD magazine also takes into account the user experience of exchanging magazines between different shells and PRO-BLADE STATION.
Western Digital uses the ASMedia ASM2364 bridge chip under the thermal pad of the TRANSPORT enclosure board.
The SSD mag uses a Western Digital WD_BLACK SN750E M.2 2280 Gen3 x4 NVMe SSD and is coated with a large amount of thermal paste to ensure good contact with the metal sides. The SSD uses an internal SanDisk controller along with 3D TLC NAND (BiCS 5?) and DRAM as the flash translation layer.
The combination of WD_BLACK SN750E and ASMedia ASM2364 has appeared in the WD_BLACK P50 USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 PSSD. This combination supports SMART passthrough and TRIM, as shown in the CrystalDiskInfo screenshot below.
| Smart Passthrough – CrystalDiskInfo | |
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The table below provides a comparative view of the specifications of the different direct-attached storage devices featured in this review.
| Direct-attached storage device configuration comparison | ||
| aspect | ||
| downstream port | PCIe 3.0×4 | PCIe 3.0×4 |
| upstream port | PCIe 3.0 x4 (SSD Mag) USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C (transmit) |
PCIe 3.0 x4 (SSD Mag) USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C (transmit) |
| bridge chip | ASMedia ASM2364 (transmission) | ASMedia ASM2364 (transmission) |
| strength | bus powered | bus powered |
| Use Cases | Compact portable SSD with stand-alone TRANSPORT enclosure for multi-user/multi-location professional use cases | Compact portable SSD with stand-alone TRANSPORT enclosure for multi-user/multi-location professional use cases |
| physical size | 109.8mm x 28mm x 7.5mm (SSD disk) 130.4mm x 71.5mm x 16mm (shipping) |
109.8mm x 28mm x 7.5mm (SSD disk) 130.4mm x 71.5mm x 16mm (shipping) |
| weight | 45 grams (SSD Mag) 165 g (shipping) |
45 grams (SSD Mag) 165 g (shipping) |
| cable | 50cm USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 20Gbps Type-C to Type-C | 50cm USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 20Gbps Type-C to Type-C |
| Smart pass-through | Yes | Yes |
| UASP support | Yes | Yes |
| trim thru | Yes | Yes |
| Hardware encryption | No | No |
| Evaluate storage | WD_BLACK SN750E (SanDisk??L BiCS?3D TLC) | WD_BLACK SN750E (SanDisk??L BiCS?3D TLC) |
| price | $340 | $220 |
| Comment link | SanDisk PRO-BLADE TRANSPORT 4TB review | SanDisk PRO-BLADE TRANSPORT 2TB review |
An explanation of the test bench setup and evaluation methodology is provided before looking at benchmark data, power consumption, and thermal solution effectiveness.
Test platform setup and evaluation methods
Evaluating direct-attached storage devices (including thumb drives) using the Quartz Canyon NUC (essentially a Xeon/ECC version of the Ghost Canyon NUC) configured with 2x 16GB DDR4-2667 ECC SODIMM and PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD – IM2P33E8 ADATA 1TB.
The most attractive thing about the Quartz Canyon NUC is that there are two PCIe slots for add-in cards (electrically, x16 and x4). In the absence of a discrete GPU (not required in the DAS testbed), both slots are available. In fact, we also added a spare SanDisk Extreme PRO M.2 NVMe SSD in the CPU direct-attached M.2 22110 slot on the backplane to avoid DMI bottlenecks when evaluating Thunderbolt 3 devices. This still allows the two add-in cards to run at x8 (x16 electrical) and x4 (x4 electrical). Since the Quartz Canyon NUC does not have native USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 ports, Silverstone’s SST-ECU06 add-in card is installed in the x4 slot. All non-Thunderbolt devices were tested using the Type-C port enabled by the SST-ECU06.
The specifications of the test bench are summarized in the table below:
| AnandTech DAS Testbed Configuration 2021 | |
| system | Intel Quartz Canyon NUC9vXQNX |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E-2286M |
| memory | ADATA Industrial AD4B3200716G22 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 ECC @ 22-22-22-52 |
| operating system driver | ADATA Industrial IM2P33E8 NVMe 1TB |
| Auxiliary drive | SanDisk Extreme PRO M.2 NVMe 3D SSD 1TB |
| add-on card | SilverStone SST-ECU06 USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C Host |
| operating system | Windows 10 Enterprise x64 (21H1) |
| Thanks to ADATA, Intel and SilverStone Tek for providing the build components | |
Test bench hardware is only one part of the evaluation. Typical direct-attached storage workloads for memory cards have also changed over the past few years. High bitrate 4K video at 60fps is already quite common, and 8K video is also starting to appear. Thanks to high-resolution textures and artwork, game installation sizes have steadily grown even on portable consoles. Keeping this in mind, our evaluation scenario for portable SSDs and UFDs involves multiple workloads, which are described in detail in the corresponding sections.
- Synthetic workload using CrystalDiskMark and ATTO
- Real-world access tracking using the PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark
- Custom robocopy workload reflecting typical DAS usage
- Sequential write stress test
In the next section, we provide an overview of the performance of the two PRO-BLADE TRANSPORT configurations on these benchmarks. Before providing conclusions, we also made some observations on PSSD’s power consumption data and thermal solutions.