The Western Digital WD Blue SN500 SSD Review: Moving The Mainstream To NVMe
by Billy Tallis on April 19, 2019 9:30 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
Since the Heavy test is shorter but in some ways more intense than The Destroyer, most of the drives with PCIe x4 interfaces are able to deliver better average data rates here than the WD Blue SN500. However, despite not being able to match the high-end drives for peak performance, the SN500 is more competitive when the test is run on a full drive.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores for the WD Blue SN500 on the Heavy test are good but are still beat by the Samsung 970 EVO Plus and on the empty-drive test runs, by the ADATA SX8200. Without labels on these charts, it would be impossible to point out the SN500 as a DRAMless drive, but the Toshiba drives and the QLC drive are clear outliers.
The average read and write latencies for the SN500 are competitive with other NVMe drives of similar capacity, and neither score is significantly degraded on the full-drive test runs.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies are also quite good. For reads in particular, the WB Blue SN500 shows less impact from running the test on a full drive than all of its competitors.
The WD Blue SN500 is not the only NVMe drive that can complete the Heavy test while using no more power than a decent SATA drive. However, it is more affordable than the most efficient high-end drives and doesn't suffer from the horrible worst-case scenario that ruined the Toshiba RC100's full-drive scores.
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Marlin1975 - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
Actually not bad for one that does not have any large external buffer. That and this is the 250gb model so the 500 should perform a little better as well.Dragonstongue - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
970 Evo Plus quite stands out for NVME based drives at ~$35 more for same size (just did a price check, amazon, 500gb for this vs 970 evo plus)so while "on paper" this appears great price, is still in very tough ground with ample contendors such as crucial with their p3 ( I believe it was called) countless samsung entries and the like.
for an extra ~$30-$40 seems like "normally" is just not worth it when can do for ones self (such as clock up the slower product, tweaking voltages and the like) when it comes to a "paper" difference and more or less proven real world data this is not all that good a price.
IMO is we take even a high performance HDD as a regular car speed, sata ssd (even highest performance) still is like an expensive supercar speed difference, the next jump would be the nvme based ones which are like top fuel dragsters (at best) but few tracks let them breathe proper and have to deal with engine problems (throttling etc) that normal drive do not have to deal with AND more $$$$$$..
top fuel costs $$$$, do you ALWAYS see this speed, nope, but when you do, is wonderful, when you do not, it becomes a "so why did I pay that much more for little gain and loss in capacity as well as specific motherboards to tap the advantage" etc etc.
kudos to WD, but alas, the margins are so very narrow and expected performance so high is near a non starter for all companies.
I feel the "new standard" for storage should be @500gb for performance and capacity reasons with 1tb prefered (even a 250nvme + whatever size SSD flash in a raid internal no driver required fashion .. I always liked concept of hybrid drives, why not use hybrid memory styles to leverage as well, instead of saddling fast memory with spinning rust, use high speed low endurance flash with lower speed high endurance other flash.
they do pci-e basd, nvme based, sata based etc etc, all have own benefit and detriment. I personally love sata based, leave the motherboard real estate for other things, they should do a further rendition of sata for the hole outs (like me and others whom have a variety of reasons)
if they can patch pci-e to nvme, why not use sta 6 (like current) but tap x2 or x4 pci-e lanes to it as well, let us call it SATA-X, backwarrds compatible with Sta 6g to sata 1 ofc, this would allow some sata or whatever drives up their speed but use a familiar/durable/more widespread form factor.
if all nvme based drives would work in all board or they would not interfere with mobo, not have throttle issues because of dog meta cooling designs (motherboard AND drive maker often enough) it would not be as much an issue, I like sata drive for such reasons, mainly can look "nicer" tend to be much more durable, that much less costly etc etc.
anyways, if WD could do 500 for the price of the 250, that would be most excellent, but as the pricing is, mehhh, overall nice rounded performance with no real shortcomings compared to many others even some of the much more $ drives are not as "rounded" for this they at least did very well at, that much should be said.
like Crucial with MX100, MX500, Samsung with the 800 through 970s (sata and nvme ofc) there are levels that are nice to hit, this SN500 is very much on that edge, up the performance a tough more, reduce price a touch (keep say $40 or better gap between this and the 970 evo plus) then this is that new "leg"
crucial 100/mx500 are more "budget" compared to the "sometimes" faster sammy 8xx/9xx drives, sammy ofc got the speed and endurance markers out there, this "could be" that leg of "rounded performance" just like the mx500 or sammy 8xx/9xx evo ^.^
sonny73n - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
Is this a comment or an essay?Hul8 - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
"Stream of consciousness" is a style, but usually only applied to fiction.LMonty - Sunday, April 21, 2019 - link
Haha! He just needed to get it out of his system :)Thud2 - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
Can you elaborate?Jorgp2 - Sunday, April 21, 2019 - link
Pretty sure this is targeted mostly at OEMsDyneCorp - Wednesday, April 24, 2019 - link
The MX500 is on par with the 860 EVO. SSDs with Micron 64-layer 3D TLC NAND and the SM2262 controller (HP EX920 and ADATA SX8200) absolutely destroy Samsung 9 series NVMe SSDs in certain metrics.The initial price of any product is always high. The SN500 will drop in price. In fact, its not even selling at its suggested retail price from most retailers.
And by the way, comparing SSDs to motor vehicles is ridiculous. Please stop.
jabber - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
It will do fine for a Steam drive.fazalmajid - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
I don’t see how such puny capacities can be mainstream, specially when most motherboards or laptops have a limited number of M.2 slots. My minimum would be a 1TB or 2TB Intel 660P.