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REAL WORLD FILE TRANSFER COMPARISON
We have put the WD Black AN1500 NVMe SSD beside a few of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs in the business for our true to life data testing. In this test, we simply place 15GB files representing music, video, pictures and operating systems onto the target drive. We then copy each file from one place on the target disk to another, recording the time taken for the transfer.
REVIEW ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
I won’t shy away from the fact that I love this card. It has been quite awhile since we have really seen anything in an AIC form factor and there are just so many pluses here that they can’t be overlooked. The WD Black AN1500 is a plug and play solution for your PCIe3 computer system that will give you PCIe 4.0 SSD performance without that big upgrade in equipment. It’s bootable. Performance came in at 6.5GB/s read and almost 5GB/s write with well over 500K IOPS read and write. The AN1500 supports TRIM, and comes with a 5-year warranty at a decent price considering…
By ‘considering’ we mean this… The main players in this performance field are typically media professionals, gamers or geeks, those that just love the best. Most will already have a very well established PCIe 3 system that they may have been considering an upgrade for in order to make that PCIe 4 SSD jump. 7GB/s is a heck of a lot faster than 3.5GB/s. Think about the cost to build. You are looking at CPU and motherboard…very least, not to mention that Gen4 SSD. The cost of these three parts alone are easily double what you are looking at for the WD Black AN1500. That makes this a great deal. It allows the opportunity for media professionals to pay very little for double the performance that is key to work efficiency.
Some will cringe when I say this but the WD Black AN1500 has been installed in our PCIe 3.0 SSD Test Bench and replaces the 2TB Samsung 960 Pro that has been so loyal. MLC to TLC… Will I notice it? Who knows. Migration was quick and easy and this Test Bench still starts in seconds flat, something we hadn’t really seen prior from an AIC solution. In any case… the Western Digital SN1500 NVMe AIC Card is an easy candidate for Editor’s Choice. Great job WD!
Check Out WD Black AN1500 pricing at Amazon (LINK)
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.