WD Blue SN500 SSD Review: NVMe Performance, Dirt Cheap

Name: WD BLUE SN500
Brand: WD

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, May 10, 2019, 12:00 PM EDT

Performance Summary: The WD SN Blue 500GB drive we tested isn't a barn-burner by any means. With its PCIe x2 electrical interface and DRAM-less design, the drive isn't designed to hang with more expensive higher-end NVMe SSDs in terms of sequential transfers, and that showed in our tests. Versus more affordable drives like the Crucial P1 were recently reviewed or the Intel SSD 760P, however, the WD Blue SN500 is more competitive. The SN500's latency and random 4K reads were relatively strong versus the more affordable NVMe-based drives we tested, as evidenced in the HD Tune and CrystalDiskMark tests. In the trace-based PCMark 10 storage suite, the WD Blue SN500 technically trailed the pack, but the delta separating it from the test of the pack was quite small.

WD Blue SN500 Solid State Drives - Find Them At Amazon

Street prices for the WD Blue SN500 series 250GB and 500GB drives currently hover around $55 and $65 dollars respectively. At those prices, the 250GB drive cost about $0.22 per gigabyte, which is relatively low, but doesn't really change the game. The 500GB drive, however, is a much more aggressive $0.13 per gigabyte, which places it firmly at the more affordable end of the spectrum, as one of the cheapest NVMe drives on the market currently, and in line price-wise with much slower SATA-based offerings.

As you've seen throughout our benchmarks, there are faster solid state drives on the market that offer much higher sequential transfer speeds, but even the more mid-range options are about 20% - 30% more expensive and fall in the $0.17 - $0.20 range. The WD Blue SN500 arrives in a similar category to the Crucial P1, and versus drives like that it is a competitive, viable alternative. If you're in the market for a highly affordable SSD and don't want to settle for something based on the legacy SATA interface, the WD Blue SN500 is worth a look.


Aggressive Pricing Low Latency Competitive 4K QD1 Transfers 5 Year Warranty	Low Sequential Transfer Speeds Relatively Low Endurance Rating

Tags: SSD, Storage, WD, review, (NASDAQ:WDC), nvme, m.2, blue sn500

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com