Western Digital WD Blue 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD Review

WD Blue 512GB NVMe SSD Review

Western Digital’s new WD Blue SN500 SSD could very well be the entry into the fast-paced world of NVMe drives for a lot of people. It promises a solid performance without breaking your budget. And isn’t that something we all can get behind?

WD Blue NVMe SSD

Western Digital is known for its colour coded drives. Blue is the entry-level drives and intended for the general consumer. With that in mind, we already know that the WD Blue SN500 (product link) is a very competitive priced drive. With the NVMe standard to back it up, it delivers great performance at the same time. Granted, it is only a 2-lane drive, but that’s still a lot better than SATA.

The WD Blue is a complete in-house design which utilises their own controller and 3D NAND. There’s no DRAM found on this drive which is another cost-saving factor.

SSDs draw less power than HDDs and NVMe drives also deliver better performance than SATA drives. So there are another couple of reasons to upgrade. Especially if it is affordable.

The WD Blue is a standard M.2 2280 PCIe drive which will fit into any system which can accommodate such. Without a heatsink, there are no worries needed when it comes to inteference issues.

Performance and Endurance

The WD Blue delivers up to 1700/1450 MB/s at sequential read and write operations. Random read and writes come in at 275K and 300K IOPS respectively. That is for the 500GB model which I’m testing today. Other capacity options vary slightly.

The smaller 250GB model which also is available is a little slower. It comes in at 1700/1300 MB/s sequential and 210K/170K IOPS random.

Endurance wise, you get a TBW rating of 150 per 250GB capacity. That makes it 300TB for the 500GB model I’m testing today. The MTBF ratinng is set at 1.75 million hours while WD backs the drive with a 5-year warranty.

Software

Western Digital also offers downloadable software for your new drive. There is the SSD Dashboard which allows you to monitor and mange the drive. Check up on its state and make sure it’s running the latest firmware. It even features links to common used drive settings in Windows. This includes Disk Management, System Properties, and Device Manager. The places you’ll open and look if you’re troubleshooting a drive.

Feature Highlights

• Transfer speeds up to 1,700MB/s
• Lower power draw over SATA
• Fueled by Western Digital in-house controller and 3D NAND
• Downloadable WD SSD Dashboard
• 5-Year Warranty

Specifications

The specifications are valid at the time of this review, but might be subject to changes in possible reivisions of the product. Changes are rare, but can happen.