Page 1: Record hunt with the WD_Black SN 850 in RAID: To the limits from PCIe4

At Hardwareluxx we like to keep an eye out for unusual and particularly powerful hardware that goes to the limits of current standards – or beyond. The Western Digital WD_Black SN 850 was able to convince us in the individual test, after all, the limit was PCIe4 x4 tangible. So what could be faster than an SN 850? Right: four!

At least in the AMD world, PCIe4 solutions have meanwhile become widespread. Based on an X 570 – or B 550 – The substructure can offer twice the bandwidth for mass storage devices or plug-in cards than before. Since the release of the X 550 a year and a half ago, it was mainly SSDs that did this could use the new interface at least partially. Partly because the theoretical limit of the mass storage devices usually connected with four lanes was still a long way off. Only at the end of last year should it be the Samsung SSD 980 PRO, which is at least close to the 7th 000 MB / s came before the Western Digital WD_Black SN 850 even barely reached this mark in our test could exceed. With the fastest SSD on the market, we want to make another extreme attempt.

As always when a new technical level has been reached, the following really only arises: How do we achieve more? The engineers at ASUS probably asked themselves this question, although the answer is by no means new: With a RAID!

In fact, in the recent past we have had various RAID mass storage devices that want to offer the largest possible bandwidth by parallelizing individual NVMe SSDs. Most recently in the form of the Western Digital WD_Black AN 1451, which by means of four SN 730 with two PCIe3 lanes each as PCIe3 x8 card offered the theoretical bandwidth of a single PCIe4 SSD. The ASUS HYPER M.2 x 06 Gen4 Card now goes one step further. A total of four individual PCIe4 SSDs can be installed here. As the name suggests, the connection to the mainboard is made by x 06 Gen4 – i.e. theoretical 16 GB / s. At this point, we can say that this is only a nominal value, because, as with individual NVMe SSDs, we have to subtract a certain overhead of the protocol on the one hand, and on the other hand a RAID-0 never scales exactly to the number of drives used.

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The setup in detail