Wd Blue 3d Nand 250gb Pc Ssd Review

When Western Digital entered the solid-state storage market, their kickoff products specifically targetted business customers. Subsequently they bought the Sandisk make in 2015 they apace branched out into the consumer sector with their WD Blue SSD range.

These drives used the Marvell 88SS1074 controller, 512MB of LPDDR3 cache retentivity and Sandisk's 15nm TLC NAND modules.

Their performance was fine, though not exceptional. The 500GB model delivering 545 MB/s reads and 525 MB/due south writes, and read IOPS at 100K and write IOPS at 80K.

The biggest available capacity was 1TB, and the 500GB option cost £150 at launch. A couple of years subsequently the Sandisk sectionalisation has built them new 3D NAND TLC flash and incorporated it into a new WD Blue 3D NAND SSD.

Is this destined to exist an 'also ran' SSD or an upgrade that'due south worth considering alongside the likes of Samsung, Crucial, Corsair and Kingston?

Price

The MSRP of the 500GB WD Blue 3D NAND is £124.72 ($142.34), although we were able to find it for just £117.56 without much effort. That puts it around the same price point level every bit Kingston's

UV400 or A400 and Crucial's MX500, merely much cheaper than Samsung'due south 500GB 850 Evo. Western Digital also makes a SATA M.2 (not NVMe) version of this bulldoze that usually costs a fiddling more, though has identical functioning and specs.

Looking at the range overall, the 500GB model is 1 of the most price-effective per GB (25p), and the 250GB is the most expensive (29p). The advantage of the larger drives is that they have greater TBW (Full Bytes Written). With 500, 400, 200 and 100 TBW on the 2TB, 1TB, 500GB and 250GB drives respectively.

From purely a cost perspective, the WD Bluish 3D NAND 500GB is aggressively priced, and much ameliorate value than the glut of cheap TLC drives with obscure branding.

If y'all'd like this drive with unlike branding, it is also sold as the Sandisk'south Ultra 3D SSD, though curiously it often costs more with that label on information technology.

Bank check out the all-time SSDs.

Features and Design

There isn't much ane can ascertain from the outer packaging of 2.5" SSDs, other than the certainty that what's inside had zero impact on the external box they placed it.

Like most every other SATA SSD, this one disguises itself as a 2.5" SATA hard drive and volition work in the aforementioned situations on whatever modern operating system.

The packaging and labelling hint that Western Digital chose non to practice any more than was necessary for a hardware device that goes inside a computer, oftentimes never to be seen over again. As with much technology these days, all the interesting stuff is on the inside.

What the designers didn't practice was change the controller, as this SSD uses the Marvell 88SS1074 equally before. This four channel controller sports low-density parity check (LDPC) engineering science for error- correcting, and tin work with MLC, TLC and the 3D NAND TLC Flash used in this series.

Along with the controller, mounted on the internal lath is a Micron made cache module and four BiCS (Bit-Toll Scaling) 3D TLC NAND in 128GB packages. If you open up up a bulldoze to run into these, and that will involve damaging the rear label, then the trivial board inside occupies less than 40% of the available volume.

The packaging contains just the drive and a tiny warranty guide certificate, and those that demand software tools must visit the Western Digital website.

Here the WD SSD Dashboard can be downloaded, that monitors the drive and gives you other useful information, similar the remaining lifespan. Alongside the SSD Dashboard, you can also find Acronis True Prototype WD Edition, a useful utility required for cloning an existing organization on to the WD Blue.

These are all free and will piece of work with all existing Western Digital SSD products.

Western Digital provides a three years warranty on all the WD Blue 3D NAND drives, and the TBW of the 500GB model is 200TB. The equivalent of writing a 50GB Blu-ray to the drive every single day for 12 years.

The just missing characteristic that some competitor devices offer is hardware encryption. A feature that they've decided to keep exclusively for their business orientated products.

Performance and Benchmarks

There is a realistic speed limit for SATA connected storage, and nearly modern SSD designs approach or smack into that invisible bulwark at near 560MB/s.

What's interesting near this bulldoze is that it non merely delivers the quoted 560MB/s reads and 530MB/s writes, but exceeds those numbers slightly in our testing. Using CrystalDiskMark 6.0.0, we achieved 563.seven MB/due south reads and 536.8 MB/s writes.

These are highly respectable numbers from any SATA connected drive, irrespective of brand.

The quoted IOPS are also bettered, with read IOPS being 97.4K, a snip above the 95K promised. That'due south great, but the difference is so small that it wouldn't be noticeable to most users.

What is more impressive is how this bulldoze maintains its performance over the long haul, given that it uses the TLC retentivity model. We've seen plenty of drives recently that are proficient until their internal enshroud is saturated, at which point write performance declines to well-nigh half of what it was initially.

The 3D Blueish 3D NAND isn't immune from this consequence, only write goes downwardly to the 450MB/s level, and information technology delivers that number consistently even with very big (25GB+) sized file transfers. Considering of this TLC consequence virtually high-end branded drives (like the Crucial BX300) use MLC wink, every bit it can maintain the write operation without cache support.

Overall, this bulldoze is ameliorate than Samsung's 750 EVO, and in some tests better than their 850 EVO. If you want significantly ameliorate operation than this, you'll need to consider a PCIe NVMe drive.

Because the WD Blueish 3D NAND is wringing the last $.25 per second out of SATA III bandwidth, and even the very best SATA connected devices don't become much faster.

One mild weakness is the TBW (Total Bytes Written) which is just 100TBW on the 250GB and 200TBW on 500GB model covered here.

To put this in perspective; the 200TB level is more than the 150TB Samsung 850 Evo 500GB offers, but 33% less than the 300TB that the new 860 Evo is claiming.

Almost users will never actually meet the TBW of their drives, just information technology is something worth consideringif you hammer your storage every day.

Specs

WD Blue 3D NAND: Specs

• Capacities: 250/500GB/1TB/2TB
• Capacity tested: 500GB
• Tested 4KB performance: forty.73/100.4 MB/s
• Tested sequential performance: 564.5/538.0 MB/south
• Controller: Marvell 88SS1074
• Flash technology: 64-layer 512Gb 3D TLC NAND
• Connection: SATA Iii 6GB/s
• Claimed power consumption: 60 mW active / 56 mW idle
• Warranty: 3 years
• Dimensions: 69.85x100.2 x7mm

Tags:

• Components
• PC Upgrades
• Storage

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Source: https://www.techadvisor.com/review/wd-blue-3d-nand-review-3673445/

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