WD_Black AN1500 NVMe SSD RAID Card Review

SPECworkstation 3 Benchmark

The SPECworkstation 3 was introduced in 2018 and features 30 workloads containing nearly 140 tests. The developer updated the storage workloads that are based on traces of nearly two-dozen applications. We ran the storage workload (WPCstorge) and are using the results from just three of the tests to show the performance difference between the SSDs that we are testing. Individual scores are generated for each test and a composite score for each category is calculated based on a reference machine, yielding a “bigger is better” result. We are using the actual ‘raw score’ result in three tests that we want to show actual transfer rates rather than a composite score.

The first workload that we will be showing is a trace that uses Microsoft Visual Studio to compile a build of Mozilla Firefox browser. The WD_Black AN1500 finished this workload with a read speed of 2487.0 MB/s and 283.0 MB/s write.

The next trace involves a Handbrake transcode and the WD_Black AN1500 2TB AIC finished with 553.4 MB/s on the read speed and 208.8 MB/s on the write side.

In the 7zip workload the WD_Black AN1500 AIC came in with a second best result of 5834.3 MB/s read and 227.2 MB/s write.