Of all the SSD manufacturers, if you ask what is the best option for gamers, WD_Black I think it is the brand that we should look at first. Western Digital has long been one of the leading brands for gamers (how can we forget the legendary VelociRaptor discs?) but its merger with SanDisk and the new WD_Black family have pretty much dried up the competition at the top level.
The SSD we will examine today, WD_Black’s AN1500 is different from all other members of the family. Unlike the discs we attach to these SSD or SATA slots, they are directly plugged into the PCIe slot, referred to as “add-in cards”. This also brings him some features that you won’t find in other SSDs, as well as new issues that you should pay attention to when it comes to system compatibility. If you use it correctly, it is the most miraculous SSD you can find on the market right now.
There’s a solution, even if it doesn’t have a slot
the biggest plus of the WD_Black AN1500 is that it is attached to the PCIe slot. What limits today’s motherboards the most is that there are only one or two M.2 slots. It’s still impossible to understand why there’s so many SATA slots, why the number of M.2s isn’t increasing. Moreover, sata SSDs perform so poorly (12 times faster than the AN1500) that they can no longer be an alternative. Then if your M.2 slots are full and you don’t want to throw away SSDs, your only expansion option may be an SSD or adapter installed in the PCIe slot.
You have several solutions to use SSD via PCIe. But what makes WD_Black AN1500 different from all of this is that everything you need comes together. Most importantly, two high-performance SSDs work as RAID in themselves. You see the AN1500 from the outside as a single disk and you don’t have to do anything extra, but in fact, two disks work simultaneously inside, giving the AN1500 close to double the performance. With a staggering 6500GB/s in sequential read and 4100GB/s in write, this drive has unrivalled performance within PCIe 3.0 SSDs. Already the theoretical speed for M.2 slots in PCIe 3.0 is 3,938GB/s. So unless pcie 4.0 is there, it’s impossible for another M.2 SSD to approach the AN1500 at speed.
You are both getting the performance of the third generation and the next generation, and increasing the number of SSD slots. I told you this driver was miraculous. I’m very obsessed with the loading speed of games, and when I switched my favorite games to the AN1500, life changed. I was already using a very robust SSD with 3500MB/s reading in the system, but suddenly the games started loading twice as fast, I was surprised at the old speeds I’d been patient with up to now. Especially since the two games I’ve been playing the most these days are crazy mode, so they didn’t know how to load (Bannerlord and ARK), so somehow they were loaded faster than twice as fast. I used to click on the server at ARK and make coffee sandwiches, and now if I go get water, I’ll catch up.
In my tests on the semi-full disk, I also received reads between 5,200MB/s and 6,040MB/s and write results between 3,680MB/s and 4,130MB/s, which indicates that WD’s speed claim is not empty.
What I’ve told you so far is fine, but the more you look at its other features, the more you admire the AN1500. First of all, it has a solid, massive structure, and when you pick it up, it feels like I paid for the right product. It’s very easy to assemble and takes up very little space in the chassis. It has a sweet RGB lighting with beautiful colors around it. WD_Black’s Dashboard app is incredibly beautiful, you can adjust all kinds of settings, including RGB settings and performance, and you can follow all the features of the drive (PCIe path, Heat, Life, etc.).
To adopt this beauty in the right home
In short, if the price is not a problem, a product that every player would like to add to their system is the AN1500. But before you get fired up and chase stock, you’re going to have to thoroughly investigate whether it fits your system. Because how PCIe slots share data paths on processor and chipset controllers is a very complicated issue. The reason the AN1500 performs so well is because it uses the PCIe x8 bus, which is better than the M.2. If you hold it and plug it into a slot that runs PCIe x4, the speed cannot exceed 3,938MB/s, especially if you hold it and plug it into x2, you will stay at 1,969MB/s.
What’s even more complicated is that depending on the motherboard manufacturer and model, these PCIes can be shared with M.2 and SATA slots. So when you insert a PCIe card into your motherboard, you have the chance to cancel your M.2 slot or, even more riskyly, reduce the bus of your video card. If both your motherboard and video card are pcie 4.0 supported, that’s not a big problem (maybe you’ll have a 1-2% performance difference), but if one of them is PCIe 3.0, there may be serious performance problems.
That’s why you need to download the “compatibility list” file on the website and see if you have your own motherboard to make sure the AN1500 will work properly on your system, as well as review the “expansion slots” and “PCIe operating mode” sections of your motherboard booklet and check which slot you are wearing.
WD_Black AN1500 has 1TB, 2TB and 4TB models on the market. It looked sold out in the market when we did this review, but it could be bought from amazon.com.tr for as little as £4,800 with a transfer to Germany.
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