Out of the box, the P40 Game Drive is formatted in exFAT. We re-formatted the drive to NTFS so we could run some of our benchmarks.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure the theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using V8.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems' performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
WD's official Sequential speed ratings for the 500GB version of the Black P40 Game Drive as up to 2,000MB/s for reads and up to 1,950MB/s for writes. We could confirm both official figures with the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark with the best test read result of 2,081MB/s and a best write result of 1,951MB/s.