Overall and Final Verdict
Western Digital has kept busy expanding their gaming WD_Black lineup and It's great to see them go beyond your standard drives with the AN1500. PCI drives aren’t all that typical but they do open up options for people who don’t have M.2 slots or only have one and have already filled it to get NVMe performance. In this case, the performance is a mixed bag, however. Specifically, the AN1500 is a monster when you are doing sequential file transfers and high queue depth work. That means copying large files and when with medium file sizes you have a lot of actions queue up all at once. Really it isn’t slow in the other situations as well, but its performance in a lot of those other tests were closer and sometimes lower than the SN750 which is the drive that the AN1500 has two of inside running in RAID 0. What that means is that in some situations newer PCIe 4.0 drives are going to be faster, which is what most new drives are moving to including WD with their new SN850. The AN1500 also adds styling with its metal armor casing and the RGB lighting across the top and end of the drive.
In total, the AN1500 has a limited life span with fast PCIe 4.0 drives coming out in the future. But being PCIe 3.0 and fast it does offer better speed in some situations for people who don’t have PCIe 4.0 available which is most of the market other than the last generation of AMD Ryzen systems. The downside to the PCI configuration as a whole is that it does mean that in some systems that don’t have the PCI lanes running it will mean your video card will be capped at x8 as well. So keep that in mind. That wasn’t an issue a few years ago, but I haven’t done updated testing on that situation recently with the latest cards.
Beyond all of that, the WD Black AN1500 is also going to struggle due to its configuration when it comes to pricing. Running two M.2 drives as well as the raid controller, RGB, and the cool housing all costs more to make than a single M.2 drive. So M.2 drives, specifically PCIe 4.0 drives are going to be cheaper. Our 1TB AN1500 has an MSRP of $299 where a similar capacity 4.0 M.2 drive would be around $199 give or take depending on the model. In other words, if you need the AN1500 due to being limited on M.2 slots or not having a new PCIe 4.0 system you will pay a bit of a premium for it. Even when compared to buying two SN750’s which our 500GB models would be $62.99 right now. I wish they did sell the AN1500 driveless, because I do think it would be a popular option as well with its styling, RGB, and as a way to expand storage.
Live Pricing: HERE
