WD Blue SN500 SSD Review: NVMe Performance, Dirt Cheap
WD Blue SN500 SSD - Performance Summary And Verdict
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.
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.
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