WD Black NVMe 3D and SanDisk Extreme PRO NVMe 3D 1TB 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, 2, 3, 4, 8, 16 and 32. 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: Wow, the WD Black NVMe drive shredded this benchmark and turned in a score of over 15,500 on the default SSD test in Anvil Storage Utilities with 100% compression (incompressible data). The drive topped out at 2,848 MB/s read and 2,730 MB/s write speeds on the sequential performance test with 4MB file sizes. Random 4K QD1 performance was solid with 46 MB/s read (~12,000 IOPs) and 149 MB/s write (38,000 IOPS). These are some of the highest PCIe NVMe numbers that we have ever seen, so WD has a screamer here.
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 dropped down just slightly to 15,444 points.
Benchmark Results: When it comes to random read performance the WD Black NVMe drive does well at low queue depths as well as higher queue depths. The only drives to perform better at most of the queue depths were the Intel Optane 900P, Intel Optane 800P and Samsung SSD 960 PRO. The WD Black NVMe is looking good on the Random Read side, but what about Random Writes.
Benchmark Results: When it comes to Random 4K write performance the low queue depth performance on the WD Black NVMe 1TB drive was on par with Samsung SSD 960 PRO 2TB at queue depth 1-4, but at QD8 it was faster than all the other PCIe NVMe drives that we have tested. We put more weight on low QD results since more consumer workloads are taking place there, but really solid results from WD.