WD Black 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD Review

ATTO & CrystalDiskMark

ATTO v3.05

ATTO is one of the oldest drive benchmarks still being used today and is still very relevant in the SSD world. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that can be very easily interpreted. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5KB through 64MB transfer sizes with the total length being 256MB.

ATTO – WD Black PCIe 512GB:

Benchmark Results: ATTO showed the WD Black PCIe 512GB SSD topping out at 1,955 MB/s read and 832 MB/s write in the standard overlapped I/O benchmark. This drive is rated at 2,050 MB/s max sequential read and 800 max sequential write, so we came up short on the read score.

Benchmark Results: When comparing the the other SSD models you can quickly see that it does just okay. It’s slower than the other 11 drives tested at the low file sizes in the read test up and then finally manages not to be in last place once the file sizes reach 32KB. It does slightly better on the writes, but as you can see the performance mirrors the Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD from 2014 that doesn’t feature NVMe support.

CrystalDiskMark 5.2.0 x64

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) and shows the highest score of five runs.

CystalDiskmark -WD Black PCIe 512GB:

Benchmark Results: The WD Black PCIe 512GB SSD reached 1,179 MB/s read and 844 MB/s write in the standard sequential write test and Random 4K performance was 48 MB/s read and 154 MB/s write. When we ran the test again set to 0Fill mode the sequential score dropped down to 1,079 MB/s read and 841 MB/s write.

Let’s look at some other benchmarks!