WD Blue 1TB SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch October 11, 2016

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 4, 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: The Anvil SSD Benchmark showed that with 100% compression (incompressible data) the WD Blue 1TB drive scored 4,597 points.

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 by about ten points and that is well within the margin of error for a general run.

Benchmark Results: We used Anvil to check the 4K QD32 Random Read performance and found we were getting just under 99,000 IOPS and that is close to the drives rated 100,000 IOPS.

Benchmark Results: When it came to 4K QD32 Random Write performance we found that the WD Blue 1TB SSD was capable of just over 78,000 IOPS. Again, not too far off the 80,000 IOPS we were told that we should be able to get.