WD's Blue SN500 is the first Blue labelled M.2 format drive to have an NVMe interface. It uses a combination of WD's own in-house controller and 64-layer 3D TLC NAND. Coming in at less than £70, is this drive the perfect upgrade from your old SATA SSD? At launch there are just two available capacities in the SN500 range; 250GB and 500GB. Both drives have the same official Sequential read figure of up to 1,700MB/s with the 250GB drive being rated up to 1,300MB/s for Sequential writes and the 500GB drive a little higher at up to 1,450MB/s. Random performance for the 500GB drive is quoted as up to 275,000 IOPS for reads and up to 300,000 IOPS for writes while the 250GB drive is rated at up to 210,000 IOPS and 170,000 IOPS for reads and writes respectively. Endurance for the 500GB drive is quoted at 300TBW and WD backs the drive with a 5-year warranty. Physical Specifications: Usable Capacities: 500GB. NAND Components: SanDisk 64-layer 3D TLC. NAND Controller: WD NVMe. Cache: none. Interface: PCIe Gen 3 x2. Form Factor: M.2 2280. Dimensions: 22 x 80 x 2.3mm Drive Weight: 6.5g Firmware Version: 201000WD The WD Blue SN500 comes in a smallish box with a clear image of the drive on the front. In the bottom left corner of the box, the 1,700MB/s Sequential read figure is highlighted. Next to this are three boxes displaying the capacity of the drive, the fact it uses 3D NAND and that it comes with a 5-year warranty. The rear of the box has a small clear plastic panel through which part of the drive is visible, sitting in its protective plastic enclosure. The only other thing in the box is a Technical Support and Warranty Guide. WD’s Blue SN500 is a single sided PCB design, so the rear of the drive is empty and to be honest so is much of the front, with all of the drive's electrical components built onto the PCB just behind the interface contacts. Being a DRAM-less design, the only two major chips on the board are the in-house WD controller (SanDisk 20-82-007010) and a single 500GB NAND package of SanDisk 64-Layer 3D TLC NAND. WD’s SSD management software goes by the name of SSD Dashboard, though it's not the new fancy version that supports the latest Black NVMe drive range of drives, it's the plainer-looking standard version. With it you can monitor drive status, performance, secure erase (currently only by making a bootable USB device), update firmware and monitor temperatures. There’s no cloning tool integrated into the utility but you can download Acronis True Image WD Edition from the WD website. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits. Main system: Intel Core i7-7700K with 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an Asus Prime Z270-A motherboard. Other drives: Corsair Force MP500 480GB Corsair Force MP510 960GB Crucial P1 1TB Intel Optane SSD900P 480GB Intel Optane SSD905P 480GB Intel SSD760p 512GB Kingston A1000 480GB Plextor M9Pe(Y) 512GB Plextor M8PeG 512GB PNY CS2030 240GB Samsung SSD970 EVO Plus 1TB Samsung SSD970 EVO 2TB Samsung SSD970 PRO 1TB Samsung SSD960 PRO 2TB Samsung SSD960 EVO 1TB Samsung SSD960 EVO 1TB Toshiba XG6 1TB Toshiba OCZ RD400 512GB Western Digital Black SN750 1TB Western Digital Black NVMe 1TB Western Digital Black PCIe 512GB Software: Atto Disk Benchmark 3.5. CrystalMark 6.0. AS SSD 2.0. IOMeter. Futuremark PC Mark 8 All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active. CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using v6.0. The Blue SN500 struggles with the CrystalDiskMark 4K tests at the deep queue depth of 32, which isn't really a surprise for an entry-level drive. At a QD of 1, which is more representative of everyday use, the drive performs quite well compared to its competitors. Looking at the two benchmark result screens, it seems the WD controller doesn't favour any type of data over another. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. We are using version 3.5 for our NVMe disk tests. The official WD Sequential performance figures for the 500GB Blue SN500 drive are up to 1,700MB/s reads and up to 1,450MB/s for writes, figures that we could confirm are bang on the money when the review drive was tested with the ATTO benchmark. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. The Blue SN500's read score of 1253 in the AS-SSD benchmark is very good for an entry-level NVMe drive but its write score of 1607 is even more impressive. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable. We test 128KB Sequential read and write and random read and write 4k tests. The test setup’s for the tests are listed below. Each is run five times. 128KB Sequential Read / Write. Transfer Request Size: 128KB Span: 8GB Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test 4K Sustained Random Read / Write. Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Thread(s): 4, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test 4K Random 70/30 mix Read/Write. Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Reads: 70% Writes: 30% Thread(s): 4 Outstanding I/O: 2 – 32 Test Run: 20 minutes. 128KB Sequential Read / Write In our Sequential QD testing, the reads peaked at 1,742.67MB/s (QD8), a bit higher than the official maximum of 1,700MB/s. The peak Sequential write figure of 1,498.63MB/s (QD2) was also better than WD's figure of 1,450MB/s. 128KB Sequential Read Comparison When it When it comes to Sequential read performance the drives performance tails off in relation to its competitors as the queue depth deepens. 128KB Sequential Write Comparison When it comes to Sequential writes the Blue SN500 holds its own against many of its market segment competitors at all the tested queue depths. 4K Sustained Random Read Performance The maximum 4K random read figure quoted by WD for the 500GB Blue SN500 is 275,000 IOPS at a Queue Depth of 32 with just a single thread. The review drive produced a tested figure of 176,518 IOPS at QD32 with four threads. Considering the drive uses an x2 PCIe interface, it comes as no real surprise to see it positioned on or near the bottom of the random read result graphs. 4K Sustained Random Write Performance As with the 4K random read performance, the drive fell well short of the official maximum IOPS figure of 300,000 IOPS (QD32 8 Threads) using our random write tests. The drive topped at out 197, 828 IOPS (QD32) with a significant jump in performance from QD16 to QD32. The Blue SN500 out-performs most of its entry-level competitors at both ends of our random write QD tests, at queue depths 1 and 32. 4K Random 70/30 mix Read/Write WD's Blue SN500 makes a decent fist of our 70/30 read/write mix test, peaking at 60,005 IOPS at a queue depth of 8. In our read throughput test, the WD Blue SN500 peaked at 1,553MB/s at the 8MB block mark. In the write throughput test, the drive peaked at the 4MB block mark at 1,425.41MB/s. The read throughput result of 1,553MB/s is a fair way off the official maximum of 1,700MB/s, but the write result of 1,425.41MB/s is much closer to the official maximum figure of 1,450MB/s. Futuremark’s PCMark 8 is a very good all round system benchmark but its Storage Consistency Test takes it to whole new level when testing SSD drives. It runs through four phases; Preconditioning, Degradation, Steady State, Recovery and finally Clean Up. During the Degradation, Steady State and Recovery phases it runs performance tests using the 10 software programs that form the backbone of PCMark 8; Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop Heavy and Photoshop Light, Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Battlefield 3 and World of Warcraft. With some 18 phases of testing, this test can take many hours to run. Preconditioning The drive is written sequentially through up to the reported capacity with random data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes. This is done twice. Degradation Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for 10 minutes. It then runs a performance test. These two actions are then repeated 8 times and on each pass the duration of random writes is increased by 5 minutes. Steady State Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for final duration achieved in degradation phase. A performance test is then run. These actions are then re-run five times. Recovery The drive is idled for 5 minutes. Then a performance test is run. These actions are then repeated five times. Clean Up The drive is written through sequentially up to the reported capacity with zero data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes. The WD Blue SN500 gets hit hard in the PCM8 Consistency test but it does recover very well, if somewhat erratically from the ordeal. PCMark 8’s Consistency test provides a huge amount of performance data, so here we’ve looked a little closer at how the WD Blue SN500 performs in each of the benchmarks test suites. Adobe Creative Cloud The drive struggles throughout the Adobe CC part of the test - especially the Photoshop Heavy, Photoshop Light and Indesign test traces. Although these three tests prove challenging to the drive it does recover well, with the best recovery performance coming from the two Photoshop tests. However, the recovery for all the tests isn't exactly what you would call smooth. Microsoft Office The Microsoft Office part of the test really stresses the drive, with all three test traces causing the drive problems throughout the Degradation and Steady State phases. The recovery for all three is pretty good, however. Casual Gaming In the casual gaming part of the test, the drive copes with the World Of Warcraft trace much easier than with the Battlefield 3 trace, which suffers a huge drop in performance in the second Steady State run. Just like the Consistency test, PCMark 8’s Standard Storage test also saves a large amount of performance data. The default test runs through the test suite of 10 applications three times. Here we show the total bandwidth performance for each of the individual test suites for the third and final benchmark run. The drive handles the PCMark 8 Standard Storage test pretty well, with the two Photoshop tests producing over 1GB bandwidth each. Even though it only uses an x2 PCIe interface, the drive produces 475MB of total bandwidth for the PCMark8 Standard Storage Test. For the long term performance stability test, we set the drive up to run a 20-minute 4K random test with a 30% write, 70% read split, at a Queue Depth of 256 over the entire disk. The WD Blue SN500 500GB drive averaged 30,337 IOPS for the test with a performance stability of 59.6%, which is good for a drive of this class. To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO. To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSDss we use the same files but transfer to and from a 512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400 We use the following folder/file types: 100GB data file. 60GB iso image. 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files. 50GB File folder – 28,523 files. 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files). 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of png, raw and jpeg images). 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files). 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo. 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO 512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400 The WD Blue SN500 handled both sets of real life file transfer tests without any problems. WD's Blue range of drives covers the mainstream market segment and consists of traditional mechanical drives, as well as SATA based SSDs in both 2.5in and M.2 formats. The new Blue SN500 is the first NVMe drive to carry the Blue label and it marks a change in direction for the Blue series, as the SN500 is not being viewed as a mainstream product but more of an entry level NVMe drive to sit under the WD Black NVMe drives. Just as WD's Black SN750 enthusiast drive is derived from an OEM drive so is the new Blue SN500, in this case it is based on the SN520. This has led to a rather odd looking drive layout. The SN520 is available in three M.2 formats; 2230, 2242 and 2280. With the diminutive 2230 layout all the electrical components have to be built within the 30mm layout restriction of the PCB. The other two drives use the same layout so there is wasted PCB real estate in the 2242 and 2280 designs and as it uses the same design, the SN500 has the same layout - it only uses the first 30mm of the 80mm long PCB to house the NAND and controller which why the PCB looks a little odd. The largest drive in the SN520 range is 512GB which is why currently there are only two capacities for the SN500, 250GB and 500GB; it's a real shame that there isn't a 1TB option at the time of writing this review. WD's official performance figures for the 500GB SN500 are up to 1,700MB/s for Sequential reads and up to 1,450MB/s for writes. Using the ATTO benchmark we could confirm these figures with the review drive producing figures of 1,750MB/s for reads and 1,465MB/s for writes. Our own Sequential tests produced a read figure of 1,739.21MB/s with writes coming in at 1,386.41MB/s. 4K random performance figures are up to 275,000 IOPS for reads (QD32 1Thread) and up to 300,000 IOPS for writes (QD32 8 Threads). The best 4K random read speed we could get from the drive with our tests was 176,518 IOPS, while we got a bit closer to the official write figure at 197,828 IOPS. To help keep the SN500 at a competitive price point the drive uses just an x2 PCIe interface and it's a DRAM-less design. It also doesn't use the HMB (Host Memory Buffer) feature. While all this is good from a cost point of view it, of course, does nothing to help the drives performance. WD's SN500 isn't the fastest NVMe drive we've seen by quite some margin, but that's not the point - it's still much faster than a 6Gb/s SATA drive. The entry level NVMe market is all about getting the price of NVMe drives down to the level of SATA drives so that they become a viable alternative to the 6Gb/s drive. Considering the SN500 is under £70, it offers great value for an entry level NVMe drive. We found the 500GB WD Blue SN500 on Overclockers UK for £68.99 (inc VAT) HERE Pros. Well priced for an entry level NVMe drive. Price. 5-year warranty. Cons. No 1TB model in the family. DRAM-less design effects random performance. KitGuru says: With the Blue SN500, WD now has a foot in both ends of the consumer NVMe SSD spectrum.
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