Anvil's Storage Utilities:
Anvil's Storage Utilities is another benchmark designed with SSDs in mind. The standard storage benchmark measures a drive's performance by testing its transfer speeds, access times and IOPS.
Iometer:
Lastly, I ran a series of tests using Iometer. This tool can be configured to benchmark a number of things. In this case, I used it to measure the WD_BLACK SN850's read and write speeds and the number of operations per second. The tests were run using random bytes and a queue depth of 3.
The WD_BLACK SN850's performance was very similar to what we saw in our other tests. The drive was able to read at 6745.62 MB/s and write at 5115.23 MB/s.
The WD_BLACK SN850 also performed very well when doing random reads and writes. In our tests, the drive was able to read at 395.34 MB/s and write at a blazing 824.23 MB/s.
According to Western Digital, the 1TB WD_BLACK SN850 is capable of 1,000,000 (yes, a million) IOPS when reading and 720,000 IOPS when writing 4K blocks. With two threads and a queue depth of three, the drive reached 101,206 random read IOPS and 211,003 random write IOPS.
As with most drives, the WD_BLACK SN850 performed better with more threads and at higher queue depths. With eight threads and the queue depth set to 32, it reached 553,222 random read IOPS and 473,092 random write IOPS. Sadly, I could not push the WD_BLACK SN850 any harder as the number of threads I could run within Iometer was limited by the processor in our test system. Needless to say, if you want to hit that magic 1,000,000 number, you'll probably want to pair the WD_BLACK SN850 with a processor that has 16 or more threads, like the Ryzen 7.