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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rkmcquillen - Sunday, April 21, 2019 - link
This review is glowing about this hard drive. Contrast that with StorageReview.com, which basically says "stay away". I don't understand how these 2 reviews could be so different.https://www.storagereview.com/wd_blue_sn500_nvme_s...
"the drive placed last in every performance test we put it through"
DyneCorp - Sunday, April 21, 2019 - link
Did you even read the full article from the review you posted?Conclusion:
"In the end, for users looking to upgrade an older SATA SSD or HDD the WD Blue SN500 may be an ideal candidate where price is the leading decision factor and performance comes secondary. Considering a sub-$55 entry price, the overall package is impressive."
Did you even read the review from Anandtech?
FunBunny2 - Monday, April 22, 2019 - link
"and performance comes secondary"So, I guess you're admitting that it really is any two?
DyneCorp - Monday, April 22, 2019 - link
Performance is always secondary in the consumer workspace. Even high end consumer NVMe SSDs don't touch enterprise SSDs.I know, I know, consumers should just be given i9-9900Ks and 970 PROs for free and everyone holds hands and dances and gets along. But that's not the way it works, and even SATA SSDs are more than capable of handling consumer workloads. With as small as margins are in the SSD game, we're lucky we don't pay more for less.
Why don't you go work for Micron or Toshiba/ SanDisk and then go work for Silicon Motion or Phison and develop "The People's" SSD? Hmm?
LMonty - Friday, April 26, 2019 - link
I read the review you linked and it actually recommended the SN500. Nowhere does the review state or even hint that consumers should stay away from it."the drive placed last in every performance test we put it through, though the WD drives is of a smaller capacity than its comparables". Of course it would score lower. Apples to oranges.
GruntboyX - Monday, April 22, 2019 - link
How is the latency on these drives? A system drive hardly ever does large File Transfers but ususually does a lot of random file access. Perhaps for a system drive its a good way to save some money without a significant performance penalty.I know the Samsung EVO / PRO drives are the gold standard and for good reason. However if the diminishing returns are small enough perhaps its a good cost/performance tradeoff.
....or am I missing something?
DyneCorp - Monday, April 22, 2019 - link
Samsung hasn't been the "gold standard" for several years now. SSDs utilizing Micron/ Intel NAND and Silicon Motion controllers have been on par or even outperformed Samsung SSDs. Even Intel's 660p can keep up (and even outperform) the 970 EVO in certain metrics, but SSDs utilizing Micron 64-layer and SM2262 are really what shine against Samsung (EX920 and SX8200).evan.drake - Monday, April 22, 2019 - link
Fueled by 3D NAND: https://www.wd.com/en-us/products/internal-ssd/wd-... #WDCemployeeBarry S - Tuesday, April 23, 2019 - link
I found the BAPCo SYSmark 2018 Responsiveness test very interesting. It kind of puts things in perspective. Thanks for including it.