NOVEMBER 2020 PCWorld 77storing irreplaceable data unless you back it
up regularly.
The AN1500 will be available in
1TB/$300, 2TB/$550 (tested), and
4TB/$1000 flavors. Single 2TB NVMe SSDs
generally run from $250 to $350, so you’re
paying roughly twice as much for the WD
Black AN1500.
A five-year warranty backs the drives, but
there’s no TBW (TeraBytes Written—over the
life of the drive) rating as you’ll find with single
drives. However, the SN750 used inside is
rated for 600TBW per terabyte of capacity.
Bottom line, while you wouldn’t want to use
an AN1500 as the tip of the storage spear in a
high-transaction server, you needn’t worry
about wearing it out during normal use.PERFORMANCE
The AN1500 performs as advertised, at least
on synthetic benchmarks. Real-life 48GB
transfers generally didn’t stack up to PCIe
4.0, though our PCIe 3.0 testbed (see
below) is now quite a few generations older
than our PCIe 4.0 testbed. Because of
that, I also tested on the latter
to see what thegaming or video rigs, but read the
performance section closely.
DESIGN AND SPECS
I led with the information that the AN1500 is
an x8 (eight lane) PCIe card. It ships with a
large heat spreader covering the entire
board, sporting a ring of programmable RGB
lighting around the edge. The RGB is
compatible with all major standards and
controllable via WD’s included app.
Beyond that, there are two SN750 (go.
pcworld.com/s75o) M.2 SSDs on board
configured in RAID 0. RAID 0 is a way of
setting up multiple drives in a system and
distributing, or “striping,” data evenly across
all the drives in the array. In this case, with two
drives, that means half the data is written to
one drive, and half to the other. This is
basically done simultaneously, hence the
colossal uptick in both reading and writing.
Twice the pipes, twice the chips,
twice the sustained performance.
Generally speaking.
While RAID 0 is very
fast, it offers no
redundancy.
SSDs are
extremely
reliable
these days,
but two drives in RAID 0
effectively doubles your failure points. In
practical terms, don’t rely on the AN1500 for