Performance

So when I took a look at the WD_Black P10, while it was focused on gaming, it was still a spinning drive at heart. The P10 is on the completely other end of the spectrum. Western Digital has put their SN750 Black NVMe M.2 drive inside giving this the heart of a beast. The biggest limitation is going to be the interface itself. If you are only hooked up to a traditional 3.2 Gen 2 port for example you are going to be capped at those speeds. The Gen 2x2 is just two normal Gen 2 ports tired together to double the speed. The SN750 is much faster than Gen 2x2 as well so the main limitation here is the controller/interface. Just to confirm things I did run CrystalDiskInfo and WD didn’t hide the SN750, it is listed as the SN750e. The Firmware number is listed as 101140RL which is different than our SN750 which was listed as 102000WD.

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My first test, like always was to run the P50 through CrystalDiskMark to check out the sequential speeds. The drive did well, not up to the 2000 read and write speed that it is capable of, but 1706MB/s for reads and 1649MB/s for write speeds were a lot faster than any other external drive I’ve ever tested. The slightly lower than expected result could be the controller but given I have seen these drives test faster it is more likely to be the drivers for our Z490 board which JUST came out.

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ATTO Disk benchmark gave me similar results once you get up past the 512 KB file size. The P50 did well in IOPS as well on the file sizes. Up to 57.76K write IOPS and 39.32k on the read IOPS.

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Testing using Anvil’s Storage Utilities we do finally see the P50 reaching up to that connection limit with the sequential read speed at 4MB size at 2048 MB/s. The IOPS here are impressive as well when you get up into the queue depth of 16 for both read and writes with read IOPS being 121002 and write IOPS being 103190.

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To see how the P50 would handle some longer-term transfers I went to AIDA64 using their Disk Benchmark which lets us run tests for as long as needed. This can let us see an average transfer speed but more importantly here I am just looking to see if there is any drop off as thermals increase. I tested reads and the average was 1526.8 MB/s and there were a few spikes but there wasn’t any drop off. Then for writes the graph couldn’t be much flatter with just 30MB/s between the lowest result and the highest and the average was 1467.1 MB/s which fits right in with what we have seen in most of the other tests.

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My last round of tests is also my favorite. I do some real-world file transfers using three different types of files which can show just how different performance can be depending on what you are transferring. The first two transfers are me moving a HUGE stack of word documents. They do range in size a little and you can see there were at least two that had images inside which made them larger and sped up the transfer speed. But overall copying to the P50 was 6.92 MB/s which sounds amazingly slow but it is what you would expect given the tiny file sizes. Jumping up to a 10+ GB movie file things speed up a lot with a speed of 970 MB/s. Folders filled with raw and jpg images were also fast as well, just not as fast as the movie at 677 MB/s. Just for comparison, the last SSD external I had come in, which was also fast transferred documents at around a half of an MB/s, photos at 283 MB/s, and movies at 791 MB/s and those were all on the reads, the writes to the drive were slower. The P50 on the other hand is much faster and much closer to having the M.2 drive right in the system.

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Documents transferred to P50

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Documents transferred from P50

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Movies transferred to P50

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Movies transferred from P50

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Photos transferred to P50

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Photos transferred from P50

 

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