Western Digital Blue SN550 NVMe SSD 1TB Review (Page 8 of 11)

Page 8 - Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 9.0

About PassMark PerformanceTest 9.0

This Advanced Disk Test, which is part of PerformanceTest, measures the data transfer speed when reading or writing data to one or more disks. The speed that data can be transferred between memory and a hard disk drive is one of a system's most important performance aspects. There are quite a few factors which have a bearing on this speed and the Advanced Disk Drive Test allows the user to vary most of these factors and compare the results.

The test supports any drive that can be mounted under Windows. Including IDE drives, SCSI, RAID, USB key drives, SATA, networked shared drives and external drives.

Users have the ability to test multiple drives at the same time using multiple threads, and specify:

- The size of the test file used. Larger files mean that the system cache has less of an effect on the test types, which use caching (see below).
- The size of the data block used for each read or write request. Larger blocks mean less requests and can lead to an improvement in performance.
- The choice of four access methods - C/C++ API, Win32 API cached / uncached and raw disk access.
- Sequential or random access (seeking plus reading and writing)
- Synchronous and Asynchronous access
- The split between reading and writing

The results of all completed tests may be graphed using our custom graphing components.

From: Developer's Page




PassMark PerformanceTest 9.0's Advanced Disk Test generates some superb graphs right out of the box. It also provides valuable insight in simulating real world performance applications. To make things clear to you, the first graph simulates a database server, followed by a file server, web server, and workstation. Obviously, PassMark PerformanceTest 9.0 uses highly compressible data in most tests some controllers can really take advantage of. However, it also requires high IOPS capabilities for the best score.

Overall, the Western Digital Blue SN550 NVMe SSD 1TB performance was good, but somewhat mixed compared to its predecessor. With results of 235.65MB/s, 569MB/s, 1919MB/s, and 136.14MB/s, these numbers trade blows with the previous WD Blue SN500 500GB. Even so, these are better numbers than the Crucial P1 1TB drive at 197.40MB/s, 496.78MB/s, 827.99MB/s, and 95.22MB/s. This is also mostly better than the Toshiba RC100 240GB, which had numbers of 91.11MB/s, 917.77MB/s, 1203MB/s, 83.21MB/s. However, the Blue SN550 does not compare to the speed demon Black SN750, which was tested at 262.43MB/s, 1924MB/s, 2014MB/s, and 185.29MB/s, respectively. For some context however, the similarly-priced SATA-based Crucial MX500 had slower numbers at 155.76MB/s, 434.76MB/s, 488.07MB/s, and 73.11MB/s, in the same respective order.


Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 6.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 9.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark 7
10. Benchmark: PCMark 8
11. Conclusion