The WD Blue series of hard drives has always held the line as Western Digital's low-cost, high-capacity budget storage options, and now the company has extended that brand's reach into the world of M.2 NVMe SSDs with the WD Blue SN500. (It costs $54.99 at a 250GB capacity, or $77.99 in the 500GB flavor we tested.) In our trials, the drive performs right around the specs set by Western Digital, but it's outpaced by some aggressively priced competing options, such as the Mushkin Pilot and ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro, which are cost-comparative within fractions of a penny per gigabyte. The SN500 is a perfectly fine drive for everyday upgrades, but M.2 drives are a fierce field of play at the moment.
The Blue Brand Evolves
Those neck-deep in the storage world might be asking themselves, "Wait a minute, doesn't Western Digital already have an M.2, Type-2280 SSD under the WD Blue branding?" Well, yes. Sort of.
We reviewed the WD Blue 3D ($101.99 at Amazon) SSD back in 2017; at the time, it was one of the earlier drives to make the move from 32-layer to 64-layer NAND production techniques. The drive performed ahead of the curve among other budget drives in its category.
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Things in the storage world have evolved considerably since then, though. The gap between the tech that powers the older WD Blue 3D and the new WD Blue SN500 is mainly in the bus interface they use to route data over your laptop's or desktop's motherboard. While the two drives look the same and are both available in the M.2 form factor, under the hood the WD Blue SN500 relies on the newer PCI Express NVMe standard, while the WD Blue 3D was at heart a Serial ATA (SATA) drive. And SATA drives have a much lower data-transfer ceiling.
That's not a dig at the earlier WD Blue 3D; SATA SSDs, even in the M.2 form factor, have their place in the SSD world. But the kick-up to PCI Express and NVMe should mean a significant boost in performance from one to the other, especially considering the high scores posted by Western Digital's NVMe-equipped WD Black SN750 ($69.99 at Amazon) reviewed earlier this year. (The Black line is made up of Western Digital's performance drives.)
Just one hurdle, though: The SN500 is a two-lane (PCI Express x2) M.2 drive, as opposed to the x4 design of most other M.2 PCI Express drives, even many budget ones, in the market today. The limitations of the SN500's two-lane design mean it will run a bit slower than many other NVMe drives in this space. And while that's not a deal-killer for casual use, it's a harder sell considering the precarious price point the drive occupies here in the first half of 2019.
A Tough Time for Budget Drives
As a 64-layer 3D TLC NAND SSD on the PCI Express bus, supporting the NVMe protocol, the WD Blue SN500 finds itself in the company of many other M.2 drives we've reviewed over the past few years, with a lot of stiff competition. (For a primer or refresher on SSD lingo, check out our SSD dejargonizer.) Dozens of drives have experienced big price drops over the past year, thanks to a host of factors within the SSD and flash-memory industry. As a result, Western Digital's Blue line, which is made to cater to the budget set (and its budget expectations), finds itself up against some of the heaviest hitters in the SSD game.
WD, of course, is no small player or slouch. But, for example, the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro, which right now retails for roughly 15.2 cents per gigabyte (compared to the SN500's 15.5 cents per gigabyte), outperforms the SN500 decisively. For an almost one-to-one comparison, the Mushkin Pilot is another drive that shoots for the budget set, and also outpaces the SN500 thanks to its two extra lanes of available bandwidth. The price gulf that used to separate PCI Express drives with x2 and x4 lane allocations barely exists anymore, and as a result, budget drives have to compete in a much more cutthroat fashion.
On the endurance front, the WD Blue SN500 comes in around the middle of the pack, with a terabytes written (TBW) rating at the tested 500GB capacity of 300TBW. That isn't bad for a budget drive but is again overshadowed by premium drives that have seen big price drops and feature better TBW ratings, along with faster speeds. That said, the company's five-year warranty is definitely the peak of what consumers can expect when buying an PCI Express NVMe SSD in its price range.
Here are the vitals for the SN500 in its available capacities. Note that WD doesn't offer it in a capacity greater than 500GB, which could be a deal-breaker for shoppers seeking a 1TB option...
One saving grace for the SN500, or any Western Digital/SanDisk drive for that matter, is the company's stellar WD SSD Dashboard software. I've toyed with a lot of different SSD-management dashboards, and none has a user interface as friendly or a feature set quite as broad as what I found here. Perks include status checks, charts that show the drive's performance over time, a secure-erase function, and a host of diagnostics that give you in-depth information about the drive that borders on the imperceptibly granular, at times.
Benching Behind the Curve
Western Digital has rated the WD Blue SN500 at 1,700MBps for sequential reads and 1,450MBps for sequential writes. In our benchmark testing, I found it measures up just about dead-on those goals.
First up is PCMark 8's Storage test, which simulates everyday disk accesses in tasks such as editing photos and web browsing. Here there was very little variance from the PCI Express pack, which is almost always the case, no matter what price tier of PCI Express drives we benchmark. This reflects how, at a larger level, most PCI Express drives feel roughly the same speed for everyday tasks.
Following into the Crystal DiskMark sequential Q32T1 read and write results, the two-lane restriction of this drive becomes much more apparent. It beats the Kingston A1000 (another PCI Express x2 NVMe SSD that PC Labs has tested recently), but it is blown out by the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro, which leads it by more than 1,300MBps in both sequential reads and writes.
The Crystal DiskMark sequential tests simulate best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. In contrast, the 4K (or "random read/write") tests simulate typical processes involved in program/game loads or bootup sequences.
The drive's Crystal DiskMark 4K write results are actually competitive with both the SX8200 Pro and the Pilot, and flat-out beat the A1000, but the SN500 falls short again on the read results behind the two leaders, and that by a considerable margin.
Last up is our set of file- and folder-transfer tests in the AS-SSD testing utility, in which the drive makes a copy of three sample files or folders to another location on the drive...
The results here hold a minor surprise, given our other benchmark numbers, with the SN500's game-folder transfer result beating the ADATA drive's by a modest margin. However, this win is offset by the ISO-file and program-folder numbers, which trail, in the former case, by several hundred megabytes per second.
I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blue
The WD Blue SN500 isn't a poor SSD, by any means. It performs right in line with the spec set by Western Digital. The drive comes out of our benchmark gauntlet as a victim of the times, however: In mid-2019, every manufacturer is doing whatever it can to clear stock due to oversupply and a softening in NAND pricing.
When the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro launched, it was a premium-performing drive at an equally premium price. These days? It's actually cheaper than the Blue SN500 at the same (actually, 512GB) capacity, and as a result flips the value equation on its head. Nothing, likewise, should keep the larger market from putting its own pressures on the WD Blue SN500. But until it does and prices adjust, it's just not the best value if you're trying to get the most PCI Express pep for your dollar.
Western Digital's latest update to its budget line of SSDs, the NVMe-equipped WD Blue SN500, is an able PCI Express M.2 competitor but outpaced for the price.
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