WD_Black AN1500 NVMe SSD RAID Card Review

ATTO & CrystalDiskMark

ATTO v4.01.0f1

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 Disk Benchmark:

Benchmark Results: On ATTO Disk Benchmark found that the WD_Black AN1500 2TB NVMe SSD reached 4.20 GB/s write and and 6.25 GB/s read at the standard queue depth of 4. The read and write speeds on peaked at the I/O size of 4 or 8 MB.

The read speed is a bit lower than expected, but it was lower on the WD_Black SN750 1TB SSD, so at least WD is consistent with their low read performance.

We really weren’t happy with how performance looked in ATTO Disk Benchmark, so we ran some more tests. We found that the the 128KB sequential read/write speed varied significantly (800 MB/s on the write test) with the AN1500 as the primary drive and as an empty secondary drive.

CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 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:

Peak Performance Preset

Real Performance Preset

Benchmark Results: The WD_Black AN1500 2TB card delivered scores of 6539.10 MB/s read and 4418.59 MB/s write on CrystalDiskMark 7. The 2TB model is rated at 6500 MB/s read and 4100 MB/s write, we were able to exceed both of those rated speeds on this benchmark.

Let’s look at some other benchmarks!