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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kpb321 - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
A lot of people don't need much space. I just upgraded my wife from a 128gb SSD to a 256gb SSD. The 128GB SSD was getting a little full because of pictures of our son and I was occasionally having to free up space for Windows update etc. We could have stuck with the 128gb and migrated her entire picture collection to the NAS or kept freeing up space when needed but a 256 SATA SSD is so cheap I figured why not upgrade. Her old 128gb got stuck in my in-law's computer to replace the old slow 500gb hd they had in the system. They are using less than half the space on that SSD so should be fine for a long time and if really needed I can always setup the 500gb hd as a secondary storage drive for them. The old days of 32/64gb SSD being barely adequate are passed. Windows + a decent selection of apps is fine on a 128gb SSD and 256gb gives even more head room.jabber - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
Been running my work laptop on a 64GB SSD for several years now. Some of us don't need to keep masses of data on a device that goes out and about. Sometimes carrying masses of data is a liability.RealBeast - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
Don't know about mainstream, but no way that I would waste precious M.2 slots on some small slow drive like this one.Sure a .5-2TB, but not really a 660P for me (they should be on SATA ports at my house). I use those ports for fast drives.
beginner99 - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
In a laptop you might have a point but in a desktop? Put the OS on it and the most used apps like browser. If you don't game you are already set. For games you can use a hdd or a large cheap sata ssd as it doesn't really matter much what you use.stephenbrooks - Sunday, April 21, 2019 - link
If you have a lot of games you'll want both large capacity and fast access.But other than capacity, this "low end" NVMe drive looks great. It's clearly possible for them to do 1TB+ versions in the future too, in one way or another.
Korguz - Sunday, April 21, 2019 - link
fazalmajid you may not see it.. but others do.. for me.. i usually use a small drive for my C drive, aka windows drive, before it was 120, now.. as 120 gig drives have next to vanished, im using 250 gig drives, with other bigger drives for other things.. so when it come times for format, and install fresh.. instead of having to move and then redo a big drive.. all i have to deal with, is a small drive with little to no " i want to keep this so i need to move it to another drive " swapping...stephenbrooks - Sunday, April 21, 2019 - link
I found Windows wants to put "User" data and "Program Files" on the same primary drive, so it can grow in size and even end up containing data I want to keep, even if I try to separate the two.Korguz - Monday, April 22, 2019 - link
i check those 2 directories as part of the " i want to keep this so i need to move it to another drive " searching, and then moving... :-)tipoo - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
I'd still be interested in seeing a T2 SSD (Apple) put through these paces. Usually they did great in sequential tests but not so much in 4k randoms, so I wonder how it would do on, say, Destroyer.kpb321 - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
This drive did exceed my expectations for a x2 pci-e lanes with no Dram and no HBM but the pricing is going to be key. The SM2262 drives have gotten pretty inexpensive and don't leave a lot of room for a drive like this even as good as it may be for what it is. I just recently picked up the ADATA version of the HP EX920 @ $73 for the 480gb drive. That a x4 drive with dram on it and should beat this drive pretty consistently. Personally this drive would need to be down around $60 before I'd consider the price difference meaningful enough to consider this drive.