WD GREEN SATA

Cheap, but the performance penalty of SATA rather than PCI Express means we can’t recommend it.

★★☆☆☆ 240GB, $36 | westerndigital.com

At just $36 for a 240GB drive and $40 for a 480GB drive, the WD Green is certainly cheap for an SSD. Similarly cheap 1TB and 2TB drives can be picked up. There’s a reason for this: it doesn’t use PCI-E at all but the older SATA interface.

(Note: this drive isn’t to be confused with the WD Green SN350. Although both models share the “Green” name, the SN350 is an NVMe drive, rather than a SATA one.)

That firmly puts this drive at the bottom of the table for every single test we ran, as the SATA interface is so limited and slow. In our sequential test, scores of 524MB/sec read and 442MB/sec write put the drive way down at the bottom.

It’s similar for the random access test, with 89MB/sec read and 72MB/sec write speeds. These results are less than half that of the next drive up, the Crucial P5 Plus.

Moving on to the PCMark 10 test, the WD Green SATA drive scored 399 in the System Disk benchmark and 519 in the Data Disk benchmark. Again, that’s less than half the score of the drive above. These demonstrate that this isn’t a drive for modern computing.

In fact, given that you’re likely to have a

PC with PCI-E Gen3 or Gen4 support, this drive is so slow as to be worth ignoring completely. Even if you only have first- or second-generation PCI-E, then this drive would still be too slow compared to the competition.

The only place this drive might be useful is in an external SSD enclosure, although you would get faster speeds from a Gen3 drive even in this case.

There are no TBW figures for drive endurance, with WD quoting this drive as being able to operate for one-million hours MTTF (Mean Time to Failure). It’s not as useful a figure, but like all SSDs, the WD Green will likely outlive its required lifetime.

Ultimately, this drive shows that the old SATA interface can’t cut it in modern computers, and while the initial prices may be enticing, it’s worth spending more to buy something newer that runs on PCI-E.

"If you have a Gen 4.0 slot, then the WD Black SN770 is streets ahead of this drive, but not that much more expensive; if you have an older PC in need of an upgrade, however, this is still a solid choice."