WD Blue 3D NAND and SanDisk Ultra 3D 1TB SSD Reviews

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 Blue 3D NAND 1TB:

Benchmark Results: ATTO showed the WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB drive reaching speeds of up to 564 MB/s read and 536 MB/s write in the standard overlapped I/O benchmark. This drive is rated at up to 560 MB/s max sequential read and 530 MB/s max sequential write, so we exceeded both of those scores on our Intel Z370 based test platform.

Benchmark Results: Compared to some other SATA III SSDs we can quickly see that there isn’t much difference with regards to sequential read performance. The Crucial BX200 didn’t do too hot in the sequential write test, but the BX300 was notably better. When it comes to small file transfers almost all SATA III SSDs perform the same., so nothing too exciting here.

CrystalDiskMark 6.0.0 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 Blue 3D NAND 1TB:

Benchmark Results: The WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB reached 563 MB/s read and 535 MB/s write in the standard sequential write test. Random 4K QD1 performance was 32 MB/s read and 63 MB/s write. Those 4K random performance numbers improved up to 221 MB/s read and 203 MB/s write at a queue depth of 32.

Manually running the Sequential performance test at Q1T1 showed performance of 455 MB/s read and 422 MB/s write. The QD1 performance on this model is underwhelming for both sequential and random operations. ATTO tests at QD4 and CDM by default only tests sequential performance at QD32, so something to be aware of. Anvil tests sequential performance at QD1 and our testing showed the WD Blue 3D NAND had the lowest QD1 performance of the eight SATA III drives that we have tested on this particular test platform.

Let’s look at some other benchmarks!