78 PCWorld NOVEMBER 2020REVIEWS WD BLACK AN1500 SSD
card could do with a modern CPU. Turns
out, it made quite a bit of difference, as
you’ll see in the chart.
The AN1500 didn’t do particularly well
in our 48GB transfer tests, falling slightly
behind Samsung’s 980 Pro over PCIe 3.0.
With a more modern AMD Ryzen 3700X
over the PCIe 4 bus (still operating at PCIe
3.0 speeds), the story changed drastically.
Note that these numbers are from two
completely different testbeds and while
indicative, are not directly or concretely
comparable.
The 450GB write test below proves three
things: The AN1500 is much faster writinglarge files on a Ryzen 7 3700X/PCIe 4.0
system than on a Core i7-5820/PCIe 3.0Under CrystalDiskMark 6, the AN1500 shows
a definite improvement in performance over a
single drive (the Samsung 980 Pro) under PCIe 3.0.Random
Write 4K(Q=32, T=1)
5,1884,429LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE3,4274,350Random
Read 4K(Q=32, T=1)
7, 1 2 96,5473,5566,077WD Black AN1500 PCIe 4 Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4
WD Black AN1500 PCIe 3 Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 3CrystalMark 6
MBpsOver PCIe 3 the AN1500 didn’t perform
particularly well in our 48GB small file and folder
tests. This may be overhead from RAID 0, it may
be something else. It’s basically on a par with the
average single PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD.Total time48GB copies
(Seconds)239241SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE31131648GB folder
write
989012212748GB folder
read
9710713313848GB folder48GB read2623223022222822WD Black AN1500 PCIe 4 Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4
WD Black AN1500 PCIe 3 Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 3