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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DyneCorp - Sunday, April 21, 2019 - link
You got the EX920 512GB on sale. That's not the typical retail price, and the SN500 is already sitting at $65 retail.You understand the price of this drive will go down? As they always do after initial release? And when the prices of NAND skyrocket again, the SN500 will have a major advantage?
For the majority of consumers, the SN500 is a viable option.
airider - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
This is WD clearing out their inventory while making way for the higher capacity/performance versions coming out shortly. Don't expect to see this product anymore by the end of 2019.flyingpants265 - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
Wait, so it's not QLC nand? That's great. It states 300TB write endurance, compared to the 100TB of the 500gb Crucial P1, for the same price. Goodbye, QLC! For now..DyneCorp - Sunday, April 21, 2019 - link
For consumers, the endurance rating matters none. You'll never chew through 100TB of endurance, especially under consumer workloads. The massive SLC cache buffers utilized in the P1 and 660p in addition to smart caching algorithms increase endurance substantially. Also, the DRAM buffer in addition to smart controller firmware effectively mitigate write amplification by several factors. You'll never chew through the endurance of the P1 or the 660p, period.Endurance ratings are meaningless under consumer workloads. SSDs far outlast their given endurance ratings.
flyingpants265 - Wednesday, April 24, 2019 - link
Well, hopefully. Because just to download install one game (hitman 2) requires about 240GB of writes. If I do that 3 times, that's 1% of my drive's life gone.flyingpants265 - Wednesday, April 24, 2019 - link
Uh, 4 times.DyneCorp - Wednesday, April 24, 2019 - link
This is incorrect. 240GB of writes does not equal 240GB of endurance lost, especially if they are sequential writes because:1.) The controller can reduce write amplification by intelligently shifting data around
2.) Sequential writes to the SLC cache increase endurance significantly
3.) Folding blocks from the pSLC cache to QLC actually increases endurance
DyneCorp - Wednesday, April 24, 2019 - link
By the way, this is evidenced by the ADATA SU800. It has a massive dynamic SLC cache buffer and older Micron 32-layer 384-Gbit NAND and still carries the highest endurance rating on the market.willis936 - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
I'm surprised there isn't a significant difference in idle power consumption or drive-side efficiency for a DRAMless NVMe drive. This is a pretty nice piece of hardware, regardless of price.DyneCorp - Saturday, April 20, 2019 - link
Thanks for the review, Billy! I really appreciate your work; you always do an excellent job and I appreciate you taking time out of your life to throw these reviews up.Without the DRAM buffer, how do you think write amplification is affected? Obviously endurance is actually quite high (in SU800 territory) and performance is quite high. This is especially interesting considering how small the SLC cache buffer is.
Do you think WD has effectively mitigated negative endurance impact through firmware?