To test the drive at its full speed we used a Gigabyte GC-USB 3.2 Gen 2 x2 add-in card. We also reformatted the drive to NTFS for benchmarking purposes as the drive is formatted as exFAT out of the box.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using V7.
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 manufacturers 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 Black P50 Game Drive are up to 2,000MB/s for reads and writes. We could confirm that official rating with the ATTO benchmark, the tested drive producing figures of 2,090MB/s and 2,064MB/s for reads and writes respectively. Using the more demanding AS SSD benchmark saw speeds drop to under the 2,000MB/s mark with a read figure of 1,868MB/s with writes at 1,862MB/s.