WD Red SN700 1TB NVMe SSD Review

To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.

100GB data file.
60GB iso image.
60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
12GB Movie folder – (15 files – 8 @ .MKV, 4 @ .MOV, 3 @ MP4).
10GB Photo folder – (304 files – 171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG).
10GB Audio folder – (1,483 files – 1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files).
5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
BluRay Movie – 42GB.
21GB 8K Movie demos – (11 demos)
16GB 4K Raw Movie Clips – (9 MP4V files).
4.25GB 3D Printer File Folder – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds).
1.5GB AutoCAD File Folder (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF).

The WD Red SN700 handled our real-life file testing without displaying any problems. It averaged 372MB/s when writing the larger test files to the drive and 439MB/s when reading the data back again. It was slower when dealing with small bity data such as the 60GB Steam folder (318MB/s write, 207MB/s read) and the 50GB file folder transfer (229MB/s write, 309MB/s read).

To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSD's we use the same files but transfer to and from a 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus drive.

Switching over to an all NVMe storage environment we see write speeds getting close to 3GB/s, the fastest being the 2,722MB/s when writing the 5GB image. Seven of the thirteen transfers were over 2GB/s for writes with nine over 2GB/s reads. The performance when the drive was reading the 100GB Data file was very much slower than all the other large data reads.

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