WD Blue SN500 500GB SSD Review

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.

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