The test system used in this review is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 3 3100 CPU, MSI B550 GAMING PLUS motherboard, 16GB (8GB x 2) of Crucial Ballistix 3200 MHz DDR4 memory, Crucial P5 1TB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I used the latest version of Windows 10 Pro.
To test the performance of Western Digital's WD_BLACK SN850 SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark. For comparison, I've also included test results from the Silicon Power US70, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite, Silicon-Power UD70, Crucial P2, Samsung's 980 PRO, SK hynix Gold P31, Crucial P5, ADATA SWORDFISH, ADATA FALCON, Lexar NM610, Silicon Power P34A60, Patriot P300, Plextor M9PG Plus, Plextor M9PY Plus, ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro, Western Digital WD_BLACK SN750, Samsung 970 EVO Plus, ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro, Crucial P1, ADATA XPG SX8200, Western Digital WD_BLACK NVMe, Samsung 970 EVO, Samsung 970 PRO, Plextor M9Pe, Plextor M8Se, Patriot Hellfire, ADATA XPG SX8000, Samsung 960 PRO, Toshiba OCZ RD400, Samsung 950 PRO, Samsung 870 QVO, Silicon Power P60, SK hynix Gold S31, ADATA Ultimate SU750, Samsung 860 QVO, Samsung 860 PRO and Crucial MX500.
As I mentioned earlier, the WD_BLACK SN870 uses Western Digital's new G2 controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential and random read and write speeds. For this test, we're using the peak and real world profiles.
According to Western Digital, the 1TB WD_BLACK SN850 is capable of reading at 7,000 MB/s and writing at 5,300 MB/s. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the drive had no problems reaching these speeds in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write tests.
As you'd expect, the WD_BLACK SN850 wasn't as fast when tested with the "real world" profile which uses a single thread and a much lower queue depth. Nevertheless, it was still able to read at 4,388 MB/s and write at more than 5,300 MB/s.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the WD_BLACK SN850's read, write and burst speeds as well as its random access time and CPU usage.
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the WD_BLACK SN850 had average read and write speeds of 2507.2 MB/s and 1770.8 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 3158.4 MB/s. The screenshot also shows that it uses some sort of SLC caching. The drive starts writing at about 2,600 MB/s and then drops to about 1,200 MB/s when the write operation exceeds the size of the cache.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the WD_BLACK SN850's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 512B to 64 MB and the total length set to 256MB.
 WD_BLACK SN850 1TB |
 Samsung 980 PRO 500GB |
When tested with ATTO, the WD_BLACK SN850's read speeds topped out at about 6.59 GB/s and its write speeds at 5.02 GB/s.
