WD Blue SN580 1TB SSD Review

WD has just recently refreshed its mainstream Blue family of SSD drives with the arrival of the SN580. The fourth-generation SN580 takes over the crown as the fastest Blue drive currently available from the popular SN570 (reviewed HERE).

The new drive sees the switch to a PCIe Gen 4 interface from the Gen 3 format that the SN570 uses, so there is a solid boost in performance for the Blue range. The drive uses a SanDisk labelled controller but WD are keeping details close to their chest details, though it appears to be a 4-channel chip, looking after 112-layer BiCS5 TLC flash, the same NAND that the SN570 used.

Four models make up the SN580 line (at the time of writing) ; 250GB. 500GB, 1TB (the drive we are looking at here) and a flagship 2TB drive.

WD quote Sequential read/write performance figures for the 1TB Blue SN580 as up to 4,150MB/s for both. That 4,150MB/s figure is 650MB/s faster for reads than the previous generation 1TB SN570 and 1,150MB/s faster for writes. When the SN580 was benchmarked using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't hit the official maximums, the best we saw was 3,900MB/s for reads and 3,780MB/s for writes. Switching over to the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark we could confirm the official rating with best test results of 4,171MB/s and 4,172MB/s for read and writes respectively.

WD quotes random 4K figures for the 1TB SN580 as up to 600,000 IOPS and 750,000 IOPS for reads and writes respectively. This is a very healthy rise from the up to 460,000 IOPS (reads) and up to 450,000 IOPS (writes) of the 1TB SN570.  With our standard 4-threaded tests we couldn't get close to these official figures, with a best-tested read figure of 454,815 IOPS with writes topping out at 411,304 IOPS. However, switching over to using the Peak Performance profile in CrystalDiskMark 8 we could confirm the official read figure with a test result of 618,291 IOPS. While we still came up short of the official maximum write figure with this test, we were certainly in the ballpark with a best result of 701,165 IOPS.

Although there is a performance improvement for the SN580 over the SN570, the endurance of the new drive is quoted at the same 600TBW figure as the previous drive. In fact, it's the same figure as the drive before that, the SN550, which we reviewed all the way back in 2019.

The 1TB WD Blue SN580 we reviewed today is priced at £56.99 direct from WD HERE.

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Pros

• Overall performance.
• 5-year warranty.
• Price.

Cons

• Couldn’t match the official maximum 4K random write figures with some of our testing.

KitGuru says: WD’s Blue SN580  shows a marked increase in performance over the previous Blue SN570 thanks to the move to the PCIe Gen 4 interface. In a very crowded and cutthroat market space, WD has given it every chance with a pretty competitive price tag.

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