Performance

Of course, I also had to test the WD Blue SN500 right? I installed the drive in our 9900K test system and before jumping into testing I did want to show the CrystalDiskInfo. This is just to confirm we are running at the right transfer mode which in this case is PCIe x2. It also shows which firmware I tested on and that our drive was in good health at the time of testing.

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My first tests were using the classic CrystalDiskMark to take a look at sequential read and write speeds. I knew that the Blue SN500 wouldn’t run with the two WD Black drives that I’ve tested but I was curious where it would fit between the Crucial P1 and the XPG SX6000 that are both more budget focused NVMe SSDs. For read speeds, the SN500 ran at 1714.9 MB/s which is impressive when we compare it to the Intel 750 Series drive which was top of the line a few years ago, but about half the speed of current high-end NVMe drives and this was a little below both Crucial P1 drives. As for write speeds, the 1303.2 MB/s write speed was up above the smaller P1 drive and the SX6000 by a good margin and was again about half of the performance of the WD Black drives.

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The standard test in AS SSD is similar to the sequential in CrystalDiskMark so I skip that and go for the AS SSD File Copy Benchmark. This runs three file transfers and the scores are the time it takes. They test using an ISO, a program file, then a game to get a little at different file type speeds of all the same size. I then have all of the results stacked together to get a better look at the overall drive performance rather than just one result. You can see that the WD Blue SN500 didn’t do too bad here, with the older drives as well as the Crucial P1 really falling behind and of course the two Black drives out ahead.

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Next, I switched over to Passmark Performance Test 9 where I ran a few tests. My first batch were using the advanced disk benchmark. This allows you to change the test settings to fit different situations, in this case, I ran the defaults for easy reproduction from you guys and they are all enterprise related. The WD Blue SN500 outperformed the Crucial P1 here by a large margin in the Web Server, File Server, and Database benchmarks. The workstation test it came in a little behind though. I then also ran the normal Passmark disk mark test and as you can see it was above the XPG and P1 results with the two Black drives still out significantly ahead as expected.

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Looking at IOPS I went with Anvil’s Storage Utilities, running their random IOPS on both read and writes at 16 queue depth, then combining the results to get the overall picture of throughput the SN500 puts out. Both results were out ahead of the XPG and the Crucial P1. The write IOPS, however, are the most impressive at 294751.5 IOPS which is third only behind the two WD Black drives. For additional IOPS testing, I took a look at 8 queue depth and 8 thread IOPS using CrystalDiskMark. Having the results stacked helps to show that the WD Blue SN500 has as many read IOPS as the SX6000 has with both read and write IOPS!

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My last round of testing was back in Anvil’s Storage Utilities. This test was focused on getting a look at how drive performance changes across different queue depths. I did this with both read and write tests. For the read queue depth test the WD Blue SN500 started off lower than the P1 and a few of the older drives, just like the WD Blacks did. Things ramped up quickly though with the Blue SN500 creeping ahead of the 1TB Crucial P1 from a queue depth of 8 and up. The drive isn’t in the same realm as the WD Black drives at a queue depth of 32 and higher. But the drive did continue to ramp up without any leveling off or drop off overall. The write graphs are similar in that the two WD Black drives are out ahead but not nearly as much as on the read graph. The WD Blue SN500 did extremely well here though ramping up past queue depth of 4 but leveling off after QD16. At its peak, though it outperformed the 750 Series drive from Intel and all of the mid-range NVMe drives.

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VaporX's Avatar
VaporX replied the topic: #38651 11 Apr 2019 00:29
The use of TLC makes me happy. I am using Inland Pro NVME drives for the lower cost. They have slower speeds than most NMVE drivers but still way faster than SATA and have TLC. The use of QLC is not just about lose of durability but also lose of speed with the write speeds slowing down a LOT uder loner use.

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