WD Blue SSD Review: Aggressively-Priced Solid State Storage
WD Blue SSD Summary And Conclusion
Performance Summary: Overall, the WD Blue SSD performed well against its current SATA competition. That's more due to the great equalizer, the SATA III bus, rather than anything else. It doesn't matter what kind of NAND drive makers use or the controller, performance is always going to max out at around 535-550MB/sec due to the bottleneck of the SATA III interface. If you want to or need to go faster, you have to go PCI Express and specifically NVMe drives are much faster - that is if you have an NVMe compliant system. It will be interesting to see what WD's first NVMe offering will look like, actually. However, for those with only legacy SATA III interfaces to work with, the WD Blue SSD can deliver.
There were a few instances where WD's Blue was a laggard in write performance, but even there, some benchmarks were better than others. Overall, it's a solid if unremarkable drive, at least in terms of performance.
WD Blue SSD -- Find Them At Amazon.Com
Some might complain at the three-year warranty, since other manufacturers like Samsung offer five years. Price-wise, however, WD's Blue SSD is more than competitive. Compared to other 1TB drives, the WD Blue is priced aggressively. It sells for $259, compared with $269 for the Crucial MX300 1TB drive, and $319 for the Samsung 850 EVO.
The bottom line: WD's Blue SSD is aggressively priced, quality solid state SATA III storage, should you need it.
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