WD Black 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD Review
Anvil Storage Utilities
Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0
Along with the move to a new platform, we decided to make a change in one of the benchmarks. There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 1, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.
Anvil SSD Benchmark with 100% Compression (incompressible data):
Benchmark Results: The Anvil SSD Benchmark showed that with 100% compression (incompressible data) the WD Black PCIe SSD scored 7,996 points with stock Windows NVMe Driver and Windows write-cache buffer flushing disabled on the drive. If you don’t disable Windows write-cache you are looking at a score of 4,047 points and we’ll be running all the other benchmarks with this function disabled as we just wanted to show you the difference it makes in some benchmarks.
Anvil SSD Applications Benchmark at 46% Compression:
Benchmark Results: With the compression at 46% to help mimic real world applications better we found the overall score increased up to 8,004 points.
Benchmark Results: We used Anvil to check the 4K Random Read performance and found we we topped out at 169,900 IOPS, which is right at the drives rated 4K Random Read rating of 170,000 IOPS. The drive was ahead of the Intel SSD 600P 512GB at every QD level and was even able to hang with the Samsung SSD EVO 250GB at QD1 up until QD16, which is pretty impressive.
Benchmark Results: When it came to 4K Random Write performance, the WD Black PCIe 512GB drive topped out at 134,200 IOPS at QD32 and that just over the drives rated 134,000 IOPS 4K Random Write performance rating at QD32, T4. We were impressed by the QD1 and QD4 performance numbers as the WD Black PCIe 512GB SSD was able to hang in there with a good number of the other PCIe SSDs.