WD Black PCIe NVMe SSD Review (512GB) – Does It Live Up To Its Lineage?

REAL WORLD FILE TRANSFER

We also wanted to see how performance was in a real-world use when transferring large files to the SSD. For this test, we are going to simply stress write performance by transferring over a 30GB folder of movies off of a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro to the test SSDs and time how long it takes. Once complete we can calculate the average speed.

Here the WD Black PCIe SSD comes very close in performance to the 250GB Samsung 960 EVO and easily beats the 512GB Intel 600P. Still, the SATA based Samsung 850 EVO out-performs it. The SLC caching just isn’t large enough to cope with such a large transfer.

POWER CONSUMPTION

For our power consumption testing, we have the drive connected to the system as a secondary drive. To record the wattage, we are now utilizing a Quarch Technology Programmable Power Module. It allows us to accurately measure power consumption over time and is flexible enough to allow us to test any SSD that comes our way.

Our power analysis may change as time goes on, but for now, we are looking at just a few metrics with the main goal of measuring our results against the manufacturer’s ratings. Because most consumer systems are at idle for about 80% of the time, idle power consumption is an important measure to look at when understanding the efficiency of a drive.

During idle, the WD Black PCIe nearly matches the Intel 600P here. It consumes under 1W, which is better than all the other PCIe SSDs we have tested. This, compared to SATA though, is still much higher.

POWER EFFICIENCY

Finally, we wanted to post up a graph of the power efficiency of the SSDs in comparison. We are looking at MB/s per Watt in this graph. The higher the result, the better.

During our write test, it delivered 98MB/s per Watt of energy used. This is the second worse result we have gotten. If efficiency is what matters for you, this SSD isn’t your best choice.