WD Blue SN 550 SSD
The best mainstream NVMe SSD on the market right now.
We were very impressed with the SN550’s predecessor. It offered tremendous value for money, though it wasn’t the fastest drive around. The new SN550 we have for review here is faster on paper, while offering the same value. That alone makes it a worthy contender in a highly competitive marketplace.
The WD Blue SN500 is a standard form factor M.2 2280 (80mm length) NVMe drive that makes use of a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. A look at the PCB reveals a distinct lack of components, an indicator that modern SSDs are becoming cheaper than ever to manufacture. It would be very easy for WD to release a 2242 size drive if it chose to. The SN550 makes use of Western Digital’s latest 96 layer TLC NAND. The use of TLC, with its inherent endurance advantages over QLC, means the SN550 has an excellent endurance rating of 600 terabytes written, and a 1.7 million hour MTBF rating (190 years+!) backed with a five year warranty.
As a budget-level drive, you won’t get the higher end bells and whistles like full disk encryption or a large cache. You do get WD’s Dashboard SSD software package that includes features such as firmware updating, S.M.A.R.T. reports and various performance and health monitoring. It’s a good little piece of software.
The WD Blue SN550 comes up against strong competition from the ageing Intel 660P and particularly the Crucial P1. The P1 cannot match the sequential performance of the SN550, though it is competitive with its low latency and
IOPS which are just as important. As we see in the benchmark results, the SN550 provides well rounded performance. The WD beats the Crucial drive more often than not, though drives in this range cannot compete with the Samsung 970’s or WD’s own Black SN750. Of course those drives cost a lot more. So, while the WD Blue won’t win any speed records, it’s got enough to elevate it well beyond SATA drives, while costing less than a lot of them. What’s not to like about that!
The 1TB SN550 is selling for $180 at the time of writing. This is a tremendous price for a drive that offers a solid level of performance. There are faster NVMe drive available, but the real world advantages of that extra speed are not always apparent to the everyday user. The pressure is on the likes of Intel and Samsung to release drives that offer similar value. SATA is quickly becoming useful for mass storage only, or systems with a limited number of M.2 slots and/or PCIe lanes. WD’s SN550 offers sensational value to go along with its decent performance and it’s an excellent choice for mainstream users.