NOVEMBER 2020 PCWorld 79WD Black AN1500 (2TB)
PROS- Benchmarks far faster than single M.2 NVMe
drives. - RGB lighting and full-board heat spreader.
CONS - Very expensive for little real-world return.
BOTTOM LINE
The AN1500 is nice looking, sports RGB lighting,
and likely delivers enough performance boost with
late-model CPUs for gamers with deep pockets. The
average user can opt for something less expensive,
such as WD’s new Black SN850 M.2 NVMe drive.
$550
system; it’s easily the fastest drive we’ve tested
with the long write; and the 2TB version of the
AN1500 I tested is unlikely to run out of cache
during any operation.
Note this may change as the drive fills up,
as with any SSD. You should allow for 25
percent free space when buying, just to make
sure there’s always enough NAND for uses as
secondary cache for long copies.
Note that our PCIe 4.0 testing is on AMD’s
first-gen implementation, and there are no
doubt improvements on the horizon.
The PCIe 3 tests utilized Windows 10
64-bit running on a Core i7-5820K/Asus X99
Deluxe system with four 16GB Kingston
2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia)
GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an
Asmedia ASM2142 USB 3.1 card. It also
contains a Gigabyte GC-Alpine Thunderbolt
3 card, and Softperfect Ramdisk 3.4.6 for the
48GB read and write tests.
The PCIe 4 testing was done on an MSI
MEG X570 motherboard socketing an AMD
Ryzen 7 3700X 8-core CPU and using the
same Kingston DDR and software.BOTTOM LINE
Faster is always better—less time wasted,
more life tasted. The AN1500 delivers an
improvement, though it’s not always
subjectively apparent and is likely not to be
worth the extra cash for the average user.
Still, there is a boost, so for those with
bleeding-edge needs and deep pockets
it will deliver at least a modest performance
boost over PCIe 3.0. It also looks nice in
the case. A recent-vintage CPU will
optimize the gains.Normally, we include this test to show how soon
a drive runs out of cache, and how much that
slows the drive. However, in this case, it shows
that the card is actually capable of much better
real-world performance with a modern CPU
(Ryzen 3700X) as opposed to one several years
old (Core i7-5820).
450GB write450GB write
Seconds258194SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE281240WD Black AN1500 PCIe 4 Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4
WD Black AN1500 PCIe 3 Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 3