WD Blue SN550 1TB SSD Review

To see what performance effects if any, happen as the drive's capacity gets used up, we tested the drive at 25%, 50%, 75% and 90% capacity.

Using the ATTO benchmark to test the Sequential performance as the drive fills shows that there is no real deterioration in the read performance as the drive fills up. The write performance does start to fall away as the drive fills but seems to stage a recovery when the drive is 90% full.

Our tested read throughput figure for the empty drive was 2,156.62MB/s which dropped to 2,142.45MB/s and 2,144.92MB/s for 25% and 50% capacity respectively. At 75% capacity, the drive staged a comeback with 2,153.04MB/s before dropping back to 2,142.79MB/s at 90% full.

The write throughput performance is much more erratic than the read as the drive fills up. The drive's performance drops the most at 75% capacity, where it reaches 1,962.03MB/s, some 102.32MB/s slower than when the drive is empty. It stages a recovery at 90% capacity with the performance rising to 1,996.16MB/s.

We used our 4K 70/30 read/write test to see how the drive performs when handling small data as it fills up. We ran the test across all the available free space. At 90% capacity, the drive is 178MB/s slower than when fresh out of the box with a corresponding rise in latency.

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