WD BLUE SN570

Looking for a great-value Gen3 drive? Once again WD gets the balance of price and performance just right.

★★★★☆ 1TB, $145 | westerndigital.com

The previous generation of this drive, the WD Blue SN550, was something of a bargain: pretty fast, but great value. It’s a trick the WD Blue SN570 again manages to pull off, mostly outclassing its older, higher-rated competition.

We tested the 1TB model, although this drive is also available in 250GB, 500GB and 2TB models. None has – nor requires – a heatsink.

As with its predecessor, this drive is a PCI-E Gen3 model, which limits how fast it can be. That’s not necessarily a problem, as its rated read and write speeds are below even what PCI-E Gen3 can offer.

Like many cheaper SSDs, the Blue

SN570 doesn’t have a DRAM cache, using SLC caching and HMB instead (see p83). In our sequential benchmarks, the drive did all right, managing 3,215MB/sec in the read test and 2,357MB/sec in the write test. That actually puts it above the older WD Black SN750, which launched as a premium drive a few years ago.

However, the Black SN750 showed its mettle in the random tests, whereas the Blue SN570 fell behind: it returned 881MB/sec reads and 1,492MB/sec writes. That puts it more towards the bottom of the table.

In the PCMark 10 tests, the WD Blue SN570 managed a System Disk score of 2,315 and a Data Disk score of 2,953. That’s above the Samsung 970 Evo, a favoured budget drive of old, and even the SN770.

Endurance is rated at the industry average of 600TBW for the 1TB drive. In other words, you don’t need to worry about this drive failing before it’s obsolete.

While the older SN750 does better in the random access file test, that’s the only place that it outclasses the newer SN570. For most PC users looking to build a budget computer, or looking to upgrade an older PC with PCI Gen 3.0 slots, the WD Blue SN570 is a great choice.

It’s excellent value across its capacity range, and its performance results are encouraging where it counts. WD has got the balance right with this drive, and it’s a great option if your budget won’t stretch to or your PC won’t take a faster drive.

"It’s excellent value across its capacity range, and its performance results are encouraging where it counts."