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THE WD_BLACK D50 IS BUILT TO GAME
While we have plans for the WD_Black D50 in our own use, make no mistake that it was built for gaming with the SSD intended for saving games and game play with the incredible speed of Thunderbolt 3. Their own diagram provides a great depiction of the devices the D50 were meant to serve.
To best serve our own use, we have thrown a Sabrent 8TB NVMe Rocket Q SSD and it actually serves an additional purpose, but for that separate ‘massive’ SSD storage medium. The D50 also provides central storage for all of our Thunderbolt 3 systems. Yes, there are other ways to go about it but let’s face it, this is quick and easy….and quite frankly a media lovers dream. For this project, we have pulled the SSD from our Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q Tbt3 NVMe 8TB SSD Review posted some time ago.
For now though….let’s get to specs and speeds of the WD_Black D50 1TB NVMe SSD Gaming Dock…
Crystal Disk Info is a great tool for displaying the characteristics and health of storage devices. It displays everything from temperatures, the number of hours the device has been powered, and even to the extent of informing you of the firmware of the device.
ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.
CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 7.0.0 x64
Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Performance is virtually identical, regardless of data sample so we have included only that using random data samples.
THROUGHPUT
IOPS
We are just a bit speechless as we haven’t ever seen Thunderbolt 3 performance of 3118MB/s read and 2677MB/s write anywhere prior to this test.
Why could cause the extremely low 4K Random Writes (MB/s and IOPS) ?
I am going to believe it is the bridge to Tbt3 that is causing such.
Would it make a difference to throw in a sn850 because the reading and writing speed is much higher (7000mb/sec reading and 5000mb/sec writing), or is the bottleneck the thunderbolt controller?
The bottleneck is the controller.