WD Blue SN500 500GB SSD Review

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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