WD Blue 1TB

Despite the value branding, this high-capacity drive is just as speedy as any other SATA SSD, making it a worthy contender

Not many years ago, a terabyte-sized SSD would have cost more than your entire computer. Today the WD Blue delivers that gargantuan capacity for a very affordable £269. To be strictly accurate, 24GB is kept aside for overprovisioning, so its usable capacity is 1,000GB, which formats down to 931GB in Windows – but that’s still a good chunk of space, even for compulsive downloaders.

Although Blue is WD’s mid-range brand, the drive is fast enough to saturate the SATA interface, as our benchmark results show. In other words, it’s just as speedy as “high-end” SATA drives from Samsung and SanDisk. It also comes with Acronis True Image software – in this case a special WD edition. This not only helps you migrate your old disk onto the new SSD when you first install it, but also lets you subsequently back up selected partitions of your WD disk to external media.

However, if we had to quibble, we would note that the WD SSD Dashboard software is clunky and doesn’t give you any control of overprovisioning, although it does allow you to view drive status and performance statistics, as well as securely wipe the drive. There’s no hardware encryption either.

Still, the WD Blue is an attractively unfussy proposition, offering a large capacity at a modest price. If your digital chattels won’t fit into 512GB, it could be the perfect answer.