WD Black AN1500 2TB RGB NVMe SSD RAID Card Review – 6.5GB/s, 5-Year Warranty and It Boots!

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 7.0.0 x64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Performance is virtually identical, regardless of data sample so we have included only that using random data samples.

THROUGHPUT

IOPS

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AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.9

The toughest benchmark available for solid state drives is AS SSD as it relies solely on incompressible data samples when testing performance. For the most part, AS SSD tests can be considered the ‘worst case scenario’ in obtaining data transfer speeds and many enthusiasts like AS SSD for their needs. Transfer speeds are displayed on the left with IOPS results on the right.

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ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL

Anvil’s Storage Utilities (ASU) are the most complete test bed available for the solid state drive today. The benchmark displays test results for, not only throughput but also, IOPS and Disk Access Times. Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and use in our benchmark testing.

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15 comments

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    DaveH

    What if you wanted to swap out the WD 1TBs for a pair of Samsung Pro 980s? Doable?

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      It may be doable…wait for it. Wouldn’t it be nice seeing this get 14GB/s performance…

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        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.

  2. blank

    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

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      Simple plug and play on a NVMe mobo… It is recognized as a NVMe SSD imediately.

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        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.

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    To boot or not to boot….depends on drive bios no?

  4. blank

    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.

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      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.

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        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.

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        doing that voids warranty?

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    Jens Hyldgaard Petersen

    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?

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    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

    • blank

      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.

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