Blitzwolf BW-D1 120GB SATA3 SSD Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At the time of writing, the BlitzWolf BW-D1 can be found at Banggood for £44.21 and $54.99 USD which equals to $0.46 and £0.37 per GB of storage. You can get another $15 off the price with the coupon “10bwssd” at the time of writing.

Overview

This was the first solid state drive from BlitzWolf that I had the pleasure to review and the while the BW-D1 might be on the lower end of the performance scale, it does have situations where it could be useful.

Let us start out with the good sides. The BlitzWolf BW-D1 comes with all the SSD features you’ll want, including Device Sleep for ultra-low power consumption in sleep and hibernation modes. It looks good with its simple black and white design, and it will fit most systems thanks to the default 2.5-inch form factor and SATA3 interface. The BW-D1 also delivers some great read figures.

The downside to this drive is the write performance and that’s sub-par. The performance drops to near USB 2.0 levels on continuous drive writes which is a good deal below HDD speeds. Random read and writes as well as access times aren’t the best either. And there is a simple reason for this, or rather two reasons. The drive doesn’t feature and DRAM cache and it is only a 120GB capacity drive.

While the drive isn’t great at writing, there are several usage scenarios where this drive would do a good job. HTPCs and DIY headless units that barely do more than boot of the OS drive will be obvious locations. The drive is silent and consumes little power which are preferable traits in drives used in such systems. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for anything else due to the low write scores.

Pros

• Good read speeds
• Good SSD feature set
• Simplistic Black and White design
• Worldwide shipping

Cons

• Low write performance
• Low IOPS scores

“While the BlitzWolf BW-D1 120GB SSD doesn’t convince with its write scores, it does a great job when reading.”

Thank you BlitzWolf for providing us with this sample.