The curse of being a PC gamer who enjoys building and upgrading your computer is that you keep an obsessive eye on the latest components and think about how to cram them into your rig.
It doesn’t matter if your gaming PC is already incredibly powerful, booting Windows 11 in seconds and playing any modern game with ease. There will always be something coming out that is better than what you currently have, which can make your PC a little more faster.
While we’d all love to constantly update our machines like an ever-changing RGB-lit Frankenstein monster, as we all know the real world sucks, and there are certain realities that can kill that dream: money and equipment.
While upgrading your PC is certainly cheaper than buying or building a brand new one, it can still be a costly undertaking, especially when replacing certain components. Your budget may then limit your upgrade ambitions.
Then there is the hardware. After a while, some of your core components will become outdated and unable to support the latest technologies, limiting what you can upgrade. This means performing upgrades to core components, such as the motherboard and processor, which can be much more expensive and time-consuming.
Aging mobo blues
This is the position I found myself in. My primary gaming rig remains an absolute the beast and I have absolutely no problem with its performance. But… I’m also a sucker for new material. I installed multiple SSDs, two fast M.2 PCIe 3.0 drives, one for Windows 11 and heavy applications, and the other for gaming installs.
I also have a larger SATA III SSD for storing files, lighter applications, and generally anything that doesn’t need super-fast file transfer speeds because SATA III is much slower than PCIe 3.0.
This setup worked pretty well for a while, with Windows 11 loading in seconds and games generally starting quickly too.
However, as is always the case with PC gaming, there are some annoying quirks and there’s room for improvement too.
For some reason Steam and Xbox Game Pass on PC no longer allow me to install games on the M.2 SSD. This is a particularly frustrating situation, and I’ve tried a few things to fix it. It seems that the only option would be to format the drive, but the problem is that other apps, such as Ubisoft Connect and the Epic Games Store, have no problem with this. Formatting it would mean having to redownload a lot of games.
Another issue is that at 1TB it starts to fill up. So my options are to install games on the slowest drive (no thanks) or start filling my startup drive with games (eew).
Or… I could install a new drive.
Obviously, this is the path I decided to take. However, this is where the hardware limitations I mentioned earlier come into play.
I had observed the speeds of the next generation PCIe4 M.2 SSDs which promised incredibly high speeds of 7000MB/s. These drives are transforming the way many people play – and design – games. The PS5 was built around a fast SSD of this quality, and an increasing number of games are now being designed with this kind of speed in mind.
However, my rig has the Intel Core i9-9900K, a good 9th Gen processor, but it’s limited to PCIe 3.0. A quick benchmark of my current gaming M.2 drive gives me read speeds of 3,402MB/s and write speeds of 3,319MB/s. Sure, that’s not bad, and that’s a lot faster than any SATA III drive (they top out at around 600MB/s – see why I wouldn’t want to install a game on that?), but it might be faster.
Of course, with my current hardware configuration, PCIe 4.0 drives are out of the question unless I upgrade both my CPU and my motherboard. It’s not only an expensive upgrade, but also an absolute pain. At this point, it’s almost worth buying a new PC.
So, was I unlucky? Actually no. Western Digital has a rather unique product that might help solve my problems…
The power of RAID
Enter the WD_Black AN1500 SSD expansion card. Looking a bit like a thin graphics card without video outputs, the AN1500 pops into an empty PCIe slot and promises speeds approaching those of a PCIe 4.0 SSD.
How does he do this? Well, within the metal chassis of the AN1500 are two WD SN730 NVMe SSDs configured in RAID 0 with an enterprise-grade controller. Unlike some types of RAID configurations where multiple drives are used together as backups, RAID 0 is all about speed.
Essentially, the AN1500 uses RAID 0 and two SSDs to divide data into blocks (also known as “stripes”). These tapes can then be written to and read from the SSDs simultaneously, dramatically accelerating disk performance.
This is how the AN1500 offers much faster drive speeds, but there are downsides, mainly with the price. Although the AN1500 comes with two SSDs (in the case of the model I have, each is 2TB), they are used as a single drive, so you don’t get 4TB of storage, you get 2TB .
This obviously adds to the price, and the AN1500 is definitely an expensive addition. However, it’s still cheaper than replacing a PC’s processor and motherboard.
The WD_Black AN1500 SSD has been out for a while now, but it has puzzled me for a while. Using RAID 0 for performance isn’t new, but the WD_Black AN1500 SSD comes preconfigured for easy use. As with other WD_Black devices, it has a cool looking metal chassis, and it also contains RGB. What’s not to like?
Its installation is also very simple. I love M.2 drives, but they’re often located in hard-to-reach places on the motherboard, sometimes even on the back. This can make installing them tricky if the motherboard is already in the PC case.
The PCIe slots are much easier to reach, although due to the GPU I installed, the Nvidia RTX 3090, being SO HUGE, there was still a bit of tinkering involved. The WD_Black AN1500 SSD has a PCIe 3.0 x8 interface, so you need to make sure you don’t put it in a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot, which some motherboards have. If you do, the SSD will still work, but performance will be affected.
With its sleek design and RGB lighting, it looks great installed next to the GPU, and when I turned on my PC, I ran a quick test to see how it performed. The results were impressive, with read speeds of 6154MB/s, which was double my other SSD’s, and a write speed of 4441MB/s.
I also wanted to try a game on it, so I moved Far Cry 6. On the old SSD, it took 1:03.97 (one minute, three seconds) to load the game and get to the main screen (skipping the opening cutscene).
On the new disc, it only took 58 seconds to load. Not one huge difference, and loading into the actual save game took about the same time, 10 seconds. But in a large open-world game, the faster speeds of the WD_Black AN1500 allowed for faster texture streaming, which led to less surface and texture pop-in when traversing the world.
It’s still early days with the drive, but already I’m impressed. I can’t wait to try more games on it, and so far I feel like it’s breathed new life into my PC.