Review: WD Black AN1500 NVMe SSD (2TB)

Conclusion

Thinking outside the regular M.2 box, WD introduces an add-in-card SSD which breaks through the sequential bandwidth shackles normally imposed by PCIe 3.0 storage support on most motherboards available today.

Sequential read speed of over 6GB/s is achieved by eschewing the usual M.2 form factor, opting instead for a x8 interface that takes up a spare x16 mechanical slot. The oomph is provided by a couple of WD SN730 SSDs tied together in RAID0 via a Marvell controller.

The WD Black AN1500 achieves its primary purpose of offering more bandwidth for the large swathe of motherboards and CPUs that don't yet support PCIe 4.0. Wrapped inside a high-quality card with RGB implemented as well as we've seen anywhere, it will appeal to enthusiasts who don't yet want to jump motherboard ship and, most likely, are comfortable in reducing their GPU-to-system bandwidth in half.

A few downsides exist to this approach, however. The extra engineering work is reflected in a street price almost 2x that of a decent PCIe 3.0 M.2 drive of the same capacity, non-sequential transfers see a much smaller increase in performance, and power consumption isn't as frugal. Such observations are inevitable when going down the AIC path.

Priced at £450 for the review 2TB model, the WD Black AN1500 NVMe SSD certainly is neither cheap nor as fast as the latest PCIe 4.0 drives. But that's missing the point, as it's a niche solution for those wanting a well-engineered, attractive drive whose performance is about as good as it gets for millions of PCIe 3.0 platforms.

WD Black AN1500 NVMe SSD (2TB)

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The WD Black AN1500 NVMe SSD (2TB) is available from WD.

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