The Western Digital Black AN1500 is a solid-state drive in the Add-In Card form factor, launched on October 8th, 2020. It is available in capacities ranging from 1 TB to 4 TB. This page reports specifications for the 2 TB variant. With the rest of the system, the Western Digital Black AN1500 interfaces using a PCI-Express 3.0 x8 connection. The SSD controller is the 20-82-00705-A2 Triton MP28 from WD, a DRAM cache chip is available. Western Digital has installed 96-layer TLC NAND flash on the Black AN1500, the flash chips are made by Toshiba. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are absorbed more quickly. The cache is sized at 32 GB, once it is full, writes complete at 3600 MB/s. The Black AN1500 is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 6,500 MB/s and 4,100 MB/s write; random IO reaches 601K IOPS for read and 541K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 550 USD. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. The TBW rating for the Western Digital Black AN1500 2 TB is unknown.