WD Blue SN500 NVMe SSD review: Great bang for the buck - sandersduritat

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Excellent bang for the buck
• Maintains 750MBps write bucket along when memory cache is exhausted

Cons

• Only available in 250GB and 500GB capacities

Our Verdict

Even WD's bargain NVMe SSDs provide excellent bang for the buck. Unlike around cheap competitors, the Blue SN500 maintains a reasonable 750MBps indite speed when IT runs out of cache. That alone makes it our favorite entry-level NVMe SSD.

IT doesn't seem that long ago that the scoop was, "NVMe is great, but it's gonna monetary value you big meter." Now, thanks to drives like WD's new Blue SN500 (available on Amazon River), price bu isn't that bighearted of an issue. At any rate not when you consider the 4X cost increase in race IT delivers. For most users, not having to wait for their computer any longer is worth a little extra cash.

The Aristocratical SN500 itself is a good performer that holds crunchy on long writes, unlike much of the similarly-priced competition. It's certainly a complain in the pants compared to SATA.

Design and features

A with each NVMe ram for mainstream machines, the Blue SN500 uses the M.2 connector and is 22 millimeters wide. Also like the absolute majority, it's 80 millimeters long. You aim the occasional shorty, such as Toshiba's RC100, but 80mm is the norm. It's PCIe 3.0 x2, which limits maximum throughput to 2GBps. We didn't ensure quite that, but remembering that SATA is only close to 550MBps, that's still quite prestissimo compared to what many are accustomed.

The SN500 uses 64-layer TLC NAND, with some of that utilized as SLC cache. Roughly matchless percent (see the performance section.) There's no DRAM squirrel away, but the drive performs well without it.

Note that in that location are a total lot of legacy systems out there that don't support booting from NVMe. You can employ NVMe SSDs exploitation a $25 adapter card as tops-fast external storage in intimately any system, which can be of benefit if you're working with industrial video or audio applications. Merely without the ability to boot from NVMe, you won't get the overall system snappiness it's capable of providing.

Performance

The Blue SN500's closest rival in some toll and operation is Critical's P1, which it hammer in some tests, and lost in others. But keep in mind that wholly NVMe drives consume ridiculously fast seek times, which makes the slowest of them seem fast in comparing to SATA, at to the lowest degree until you indite bouffant amounts of information. At that place, the 500GB version of the SN500 that I tested held its own.

With less stash (roughly of the TLC is treated as SLC by writing only a ace bit rather of three), the 250GB version (available on AmazonGet rid of non-product join), for which WD claims roughly the same performance, will drop in write speed sooner than the 500GB adaptation. The 500GB model ran taboo of cache at or so the 10GB mark during our 48GB drop a line test.

Federal Reserve note that I only enclosed drives that are cost capitalistic with the Dispiriting SN500. There are much faster drives exterior in that respect such as WD's Unfortunate SN750 NVMe and of course, Samsung's 970 Pro, the creme de la creme.

IDG

The Blue SN500 did rather well in the smaller file and folder tests, but lagged behind the Crucial P1 writing our single large 48GB file.

As you terminate see higher up, the SN500 (gold bars) did quite an well with small files and folders, but ran out of cache fairly early, dropping sustained write speeds to 750MBps. This resulted in a somewhat lethargic file compose time—for NVMe.

The SN500 did well in CrystalDiskMark, shown below,  though it couldn't match Samsung's 970 EVO. Greenbac that both competitors were 1TB drives with more cache. The 970 EVO slows downhearted similarly once it runs out of SLC memory cache.

IDG

4K performance is indicative of how fast a drive can write or retrieve lots of small files, with requires heaps of seeks and stresses the accountant. Here again the more expensive Samsung 970 EVO rules, though the Downcast SN500 did quite comfortably compared to other budget drives.

IDG

Considering that the Blue SN500 is leveraging only two PCIe lanes and has no Drachm cache, it performed remarkably well in our tests: largely on a par with the Of import P1, but without the forceful overleap in write speeds that hits that drive after it's exhausted its very generous lay away. Commodity job, WD (and Sandisk—the companionship WD bought for its NAND grok.)

A great bargain labor

The Blue SN500 isn't the quickest NVMe drive out on that point, just it's sure as shooting swift enough for the average exploiter, and the Leontyne Price is right. At the capacities it's available in, I recommend IT over the Crucial P1, which suffers a knockout slowdown on those rare occasions when it runs out of cache. Hopefully, a 1TB model is in the industrial plant, as the limited capacity (by today's standards) is the one thing that would celebrate me from installing a Blue SN500 in my own computers.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/403470/wd-blue-sn500-nvme-ssd-review.html

Posted by: sandersduritat.blogspot.com

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