WD Red SN700 1TB NVMe SSD Review

With the arrival of the SN700 drive, WD's Red product line finally gets an NVMe SSD. There is an ever-increasing number of NAS enclosures entering the market using NVMe architecture support for dedicated M.2 SSD caching duties rather than using the SATA drives of previous generations of NAS units. Designed to support the 24/7 NAS workload environment and always-on applications, the SN700 offers a much higher level of performance and a far better endurance rating than WD's previous specialist M.2 cache drive, the SATA based Red SA500.

The Red SN700 product line is made up of five capacities; 250GB, 500GB, 1TB (the drive WD supplied for this review), 2TB and a flagship 4TB model. WD has not disclosed any details (at the time of writing) about the controller or how many layers the 3D TLC NAND is using.

Performance-wise the 1TB version of the WD Red SN700 is officially rated as up to 3,400MB/s and 3,000MB/s for Sequential read and writes respectively. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't quite match those maximum figures with tested read / write figures of 3,190MB/s and 2,860MB/s respectively. However, using the CrystalDiskMark benchmark we could indeed confirm the official figures with best results of 3,435MB/s for reads and 3,112MB/s for writes.

The 1TB SN700 is officially rated as up to 515,000 IOPS for 4K random reads and up to 560,000 IOPS for random writes. With our 4-threaded tests, we couldn't get close to these maximums, the best we saw was 361,562 IOPS for reads and 281,126 IOPS for writes. We ran some quick 4K tests at QD32 using eight threads and saw the read figure rise to 574,471 IOPS, confirming the official figure but although the writes rose to 428,343 IOPS, that figure is still well short of the official maximum. Again we could confirm the official random read figure using the Peak Performance profile in CrystalDiskMark 8 with the best score of 552,349 IOPS but we still came up short when it came to random writes with a tested best of 482,974 IOPS.

For a drive that is aimed at supporting the demanding needs of a 24/7 NAS environment, it needs good endurance. The 1TB SN700 has a TBW rating of 2,000TB and WD back the range with a 5-year warranty.

The 1TB SN700 we reviewed today is priced at £152.99 in the UK.

Other capacity prices are: 250GB – £55.99, 500GB – £76.99, 2TB – £305.99, 4TB – £561.99

Pros

• Overall performance.
• Endurance.
• 5-year warranty.

Cons

• Couldn't match the official maximum 4K random write figures with our tests.

Kitguru says: With the number of NAS units appearing with NVMe M.2 slots for cache drives getting ever larger, the need for drives that can cope with the demands of a 24/7 workload environment increases. WD's Red SN700 is a drive that has been built from the ground up to support that need, offering good performance and endurance.

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