WD Blue 1TB SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch

IOMeter Sequential & Random 4KB Performance

IOMeter Sequential Performance

Legit Reviews is once again adding IOMeter v1.1.0 testing to ourSolid-State Drive reviews as we feel that the canned benchmarks no longer show enough of the performance picture nor do they expose many of the heat issues that we are starting to encounter on M.2 PCIe SSDs and sustained write issues on TLC NAND based drives. We start out testing each drive with IOMeter, but first we prepare the drive. This is done by using Parted Magic to complete a full Secure Erase each and every drive. Next we use IOMeter to prefill the drive by performing the industry standard 128KB, aligned, sequential write workload across the entire drive for a period of 30 minutes. Once the drive is conditioned we run our saved sequential test profile that runs our 128KB test for one minute without any idle time in between the tests. The queue depth is set to 32 as we feel with NVMe drives starting to come out that we need to increase our IO depth.

iometer-seq

The 128KB Sequential Read/Write test is done primarily to make sure the drives we are testing meet or surpass the manufacturer specifications for sequential Read/Write performance. The WD Blue SSD 1TB topped out at 563.2 MB/s read and 341.2 MB/s write. The write speeds are lower than one might expect on many of the drives as we do 1 minute sustained read/write tests and it fills the cache on the TLC drives.

wd-blue-qd-testing

Here is a closer look at just the WD Blue SSD 1TB sequential read performance at various queue depths using short 5 second transfer tests tests. As you can see low QD levels still offer great performance and the WD Blue SSD 1TB tops out at its advertised read speeds at QD4.

IOMeter 4KB Random Performance

Our 4KB random performance test is conducted in the same manner as our sequential tests, but once the drive is conditioned we run our saved random test profile that runs our 4KB test for two minutes without any idle time in between the tests. The queue depth is set to 32 on four workers and the test is begun. To get the benefits from NVMe based drives you must use multiple CPU queues and this is why we are now using four workers for this IOMeter test.

iometer-iops

The 128KB Sequential Read/Write test is done primarily to make sure the drives we are testing meet or surpass the manufacturer specifications for sequential Read/Write performance. The WD Blue SSD 1TB topped out at 95,000 IOPS on the 4KB Random Read test when it is rated for 100,000 IOPS. The 4KB Random Write test only hit 44,000 IOPS and that is due to the fact we run the test for 1 minute and the cache on the drive was filled up.