The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource | 
TSSDR TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL
SSD testing at TSSDR differs slightly, depending on whether we are looking at consumer or enterprise storage media. For our WD Black AN1500 NVMe RAID Card SSD testing today, our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide. To see the best performance possible, the CPU C states have been disabled, C1E support has been disabled, and Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST) has been disabled.
SYSTEM COMPONENTS
The components of this Test Bench are detailed below. All hardware is linked for purchase and product sales may be reached by a simple click on the individual item. As well, the title is linked back to the individual build article where performance testing can be validated.
TSSDR ASROCK Z370 TAICHI TEST BENCH (link)
| PC CHASSIS: | Corsair Graphite 760T Arctic White Window Chassis |
| MOTHERBOARD: | ASRock Z370 Taichi |
| CPU: | Intel Coffee Lake Core i7-8770K |
| CPU COOLER: | Corsair Hydro Series H110i GTX V.2 |
| POWER SUPPLY: | Corsair RM850x 80Plus |
| GRAPHICS: | MSI Radeon RX570 |
| MEMORY: | Corsair Vengeance RGB 32GB DDR4 3600Mhz C18 |
| STORAGE: | Intel Optane 900P 480GB SSD |
| KEYBOARD: | Corsair Strafe RGB Silent Gaming |
| MOUSE: | Corsair M65 Pro Gaming |
| OS | Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit |
BENCHMARK SOFTWARE
The software in use for today’s analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of Crystal Disk Info, ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal Disk Mark, AS SSD, Anvil’s Storage Utilities, AJA, and TxBench. Our selection of software allows each to build on the last and to provide validation to results already obtained.
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.
Other than confirmation that we were running in PCIe 3.0 x8 mode, a few things were really obvious in this Crystal DiskInfo result. TRIM is not mentioned as it would normally be, although it seems to work fine through the WD Dashboard. Also we would like to get an idea of host reads and writes through this software. Our question might be that if it is not recognized here, how could WD enforce the 600TBW/TB rating. Last but not least, the WD Black AN1500 runs a bit hot levelling off at 61°C. We have installed this SSD as our system SSD in one of our benches and will revisit temperature if anything becomes concerning.
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.
Listed specs are 6.5GB/s read and 4.1GB/s write while ATTO shows us 6.5GB/s read and 4.9GB/s write.
DaveH
What if you wanted to swap out the WD 1TBs for a pair of Samsung Pro 980s? Doable?
It may be doable…wait for it. Wouldn’t it be nice seeing this get 14GB/s performance…
I think the Controller might be the bottleneck in some cases.
The “Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 AIC” is supposed to push 15Gb/s, but it still hasn’t been released yet, AFAIC.
Good day!
How does this card boot:
– identification via recent chipset UEFI as NVMe
or
– on-board Option ROM ? (so to speak X79/C60x-congegration´s wet dream)
WD support unfortunately classifies this information as “industrial secret”.
At least, from WD´s reply, this card does not need a motherboard capable of PCIe-bifurcation.
Regards
Simple plug and play on a NVMe mobo… It is recognized as a NVMe SSD imediately.
Boots on C602 non-nvme-bios-chipset.
Detected as “mass storage device” in BIOS pcie assignment.
(A highpoint SSD7202 would show as a “pci-bridge”.)
65°C at idle. No JBOD or RAID1 selectable.
To boot or not to boot….depends on drive bios no?
This drive is recognized as any other NVMe SSD. Botable as well.
Can one replace the WD SN730 M.2 Nvme SSDs with Samsung M.2 Nvme SSDs like the 970 Evo Plus SSDs ?
Probably no uptick in performance that would be noticeable but just curious.
Thanks.
You *can* but you won’t like it very much. Non-WD SSDs on this card don’t do much better than a single NVMe drive, sometimes worse. I’ve tried 2x1TB 960 EVO, max read was only about 3.8GB/s. 2x1TB 970 EVO was even worse, 1.8GB/s read and 1.6GB/s write. I suspect something in the drive controller’s FW is setting an artificial cap when non-WD SSDs are detected.
Perhaps there are compatibility issues with the Samsung drivers?
Tried using with your OS´s stock NVME-drivers?
Highpoint just released their 6200 series NVME PCIe 3.0 RAID cards that use the same Marvel 88NR2241 controller.
As these cards are Plug & Play, too, maybe Highpoint´s RAID management controller can be used to tweak the WD/Samsung combo — can´t find a dedicated one for the 6200 series tho; don´t know if their 7200/7100 series ones function universally.
doing that voids warranty?
I want to use this in a Dell T440 server, because og the long MTBF and the low price. Do you think this will give any problem?
I own a 2TB version of AN1500 and love it. I want to get another but not sure if it is possible to RAID 0 both the cards together? Thanks guys. It is installed on a 7,1 Mac Pro so I have the PCIe resources so would like to know the answer before a buy another card. Thanks
I doubt it until one can access the individual drives in the AN1500.
You would then couple two RAID 0 (one per enclosure) to another RAID 0 on top of that.