Performance

For testing, I originally tested on our Ryzen ITX test bench but late in everything I found that I had some issues with my results. So I actually ended up testing the WD Black NVMe on the Intel Hades Canyon NUC and that resolved my issues. I went through our normal test suite with the exception of PCMark 8 where I’ve been having issues with the test locking up. But before getting into testing I do have a copy of the CrystalDiskInfo for our drive. You will notice the warm temps, this was taken directly after another benchmark and wasn’t an idle temperature.

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I did, however, get some actual thermal images. One at idle and then one towards the end of a CrystalDiskMark test. The second image really makes it clear where everything is. The controller being in the middle is the major hot spot that peaked at around 181f in open air testing. The two NAND chips on the left and right warmed up as well but not as much. Then the cache was warm but much cooler than the NAND then the one small area without a chip on it above the DRAM was the coolest. The before image that still has the MX500 warmed up shows how that drive has most of its heat all up in the one area. WD did a nice job of spreading things around to prevent them from having to run a heatspreader.

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So my first set of tests were using CrystalDiskMark. In this benchmark, I only focus on the sequential read and write speeds. Specifically the 32 queue depth results. Now I’m only comparing the WD Black to the other PCI based SSDs I have tested in the past including the original NVMe monster the Intel 750 Series drive that recently actually died on me and the Toshiba RD400. The WD Black completely stomped both drives in both the read and write speed results. This is night and day, even from the RD400 that did really well, getting almost 800 more MB/s on the read speeds and nearly doubling the write speeds.

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Rather than just run the regular SD SSD benchmark that basically mirrors CrystalDIskMark I like to use SD SSD’s built-in copy benchmark. This test copies three file types that match ISO, Program files, and game files to get an idea of everyday disk usage speeds. The results are all in times so the lower the better and I have combined all three to get a better look at the overall picture more than any individual school. Here the Intel 750 still takes the win, entirely for its much faster program speeds. The WD Black came in close with the other drives being 1-2 seconds longer in the total.

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Next, I used a few of the tests in Passmark’s Performance Test 9. Specifically, I like their advanced benchmark that lets you set up different workloads but to keep things easy to repeat for you I use the four stock tests. These represent different IT workloads, mostly different server workloads but there is also a workstation workload as well. Here the higher the score the better as these are transfer speeds in MB/s and while the transfer speeds earlier were impressive here the Intel pulled ahead. In fact, in the Workstation and database tests, the RD400 was faster than the WD Black. Web Server and File Server results weren’t too bad but still far off from the 750 Series. Of course it was designed originally specifically for that type of workload. I also included the overall score from Passmark’s Performance Test 9, I plan on adding that test in the future so I don’t have any comparison numbers just yet.

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Next I got into Anvil’s Storage Utility to take a look at IOPS performance at 4k QD16, generally one of the most ideal speed situations. The blue results are read IOPS and red is write IOPS. As you can see, here the WD Black really took off on the write performance, not to diminish the read results as well. They were also the fastest of the drives tested, but man those write IOPS are crazy! They were literally higher than the RD400’s read and writers put together.

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Then for my last set of tests, I went through and in Anvils, I tested 4k queue depth performance from 1 all the way up to 128 QD on read and 64 QD on writes. This, when mapped out, gives us a better look at how these drives scale up in performance and how the controllers handle the load in the extremely high QD counts. In this case, it was mostly the WD Black and the Intel 750 Series battling it out in the higher end of the test. The low QD read results had the WD Black ahead but it was the opposite on the low QD write tests. The Intel 750 just dominates in that situation. Oddly enough the Intel peaks at a WD of 8 and doesn’t really keep climbing where the WD Black does, it climbs quickly up to a QD of 16 then keeps climbing slowly from there. In the read tests, the Intel and WD Black are much closer all the way up to a QD of 128 but the WD Black does come out ahead in all of the tests.

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