WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D 1TB SSD Reviews
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 Blue 3D NAND 1TB SATA drive was able to achieve a score of 4,616.42 points with 493 MB/s read and 398 MB/s write speeds when it comes to the measured sequential performance with 4MB file sizes.
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 improved to 4,651.94 points.
Benchmark Results: We used Anvil to check the 4K Random Read performance and found we topped out at 96,300 IOPS using the 46% compression preset that best matches typical applications. WD specifications show this drive as having a maximum 4K Random Read IOPS of up to 95K at QD32 and we surpassed that! The QD1 to QD4 performance numbers are heavily used on consumer PCs and the QD1 performance was the lowest of the eight drives we have tested, but the QD2-4 low queue depth performance was solid.
Benchmark Results: When it came to 4K Random Write performance, the WD Blue 1TB 3D NAND SSD topped out at 84,900 IOPS at QD16 and that is close enough for us to the drives 85K rating. The QD1 4K Random Write Performance was by far the lowest of the eight SSDs tested, but at QD2 the performance was on par with the other drives.