WD Blue SN500 NVME SSD (250GB) Review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

Not bad, not bad at all. Many of you will be looking at the results and say, huh this isn't a very fast M.2. NVMe SSD. Correct, but it is a VERY fast SSD compared to SATA3 performance, and that's what this is all about. A week or two ago I wrote a news item in which I wrote that this year 50% of the SSDs will be NVMe based, and not SATA3 SSD based. The sole reason is that SATA3 is completely bottlenecked by its interface. On PCIe, you can achive much more and the SN500 is a very good example of that. 

Something to think about

The WD Blue SN500 is, in theory, a product that is priced at a value SATA3 SSD price level, at all times you need to keep this line, what I write here, in mind. Why am I saying this so specifically? Well, the 250GB version of the SN500 I do not find that interesting, however, the 500GB version sells for 82 EUR and a similar price in USD. That means that the 500 GB version of what we have tested here today, sells at a price of €0,165 per GB (!). And that's a TLC written NAND SSD with 5 -years warranty. Yes, most SATA3 SSDs aren't even priced this good.

That said, this is a TLC NAND writing product, and that does show in some areas (long sustained writes) but also the TBW values are a bit on the shy side with 150 Terabyte written for the 250GB model and 300 TBW for the 500 GB model. The performance that Western Digital offers with the WD Blue SN500 is 'okay' for NVMe, but excellent compared to a regular SATA3 SSD, it is a bit of a trade-off between performance among these two and with these prices, the decision is made quickly I say.  Remember, to fully utilize the performance that is offered for this NVMe SSD you need a supporting infrastructure and this a motherboard with PCI Express Gen3 (x2) interface and NVMe ready BIOS. NVMe based storage is one of the more exciting technologies that we have been following developments closely over the past few years was obviously the development curve of NAND flash-based storage technology. We moved from a "blisteringly fast" 100 MB/sec towards numbers that are 20 to 30 fold of that in the 3.470 MB/sec ranges with the most high-end products, which is crazy to observe.

Performance

Technologies like TLC and QLC face some challenges writing more bits per cell of NAND, we noticed a dropoff in performance with mixed heavy workloads that exceed writing dozens of gigabytes continuously. After you pass many Gigabytes of writes (and I do mean continuous sustained/linear writes minute after minute), then the SLC buffer is full and start to write directly to TLC, and then perf can drop substantially. The irony here is that 1.5 GB/sec I need to label 'slow'. After a few minutes or even seconds the SLC cache will have written out and boom, performance is back full speed. This, in a nutshell, is what you need to be aware of with TLC and QLC SSDs. IOPS performance is good on this unit, not that you'd even need values in the 100K~200K range but it does get close to that. This SSD writes and reads serious amounts of tiny files in a very fast fashion. We stated it before though, IOPS is not something you as a consumer should worry about too much unless you are doing a lot of database related work or create similar workloads on your PC, but this SSD certainly ranks high within this aspect. The trace tests also show exceptional performance levels, enthusiast class NVMe. We do need to make a remark on measured controller temperature, it runs hot under load and that can cause throttling. So please do cool down the product with a proper M2 heatsink, most motherboards supply one default these days. This is the nature of enthusiast-class M2 SSDs these days.

Concluding

Yes, I think I said it all already in the above paragraphs, this is not the fastest NVMe SSD on the market, but it is among the most affordable ones, often even cheaper than a SATA3 SSD. So that's the baseline and narrative to follow here; you need to compare the SN500 with a SATA3 SSD. For €0,165 per GB, you just get really good value for money, I am steering you however towards the 500 GB model as the 250 GB model in this era isn't a popular format anymore and also, the 250GB model is too expensive to be competitive enough (over 22 cents/GB). Then as well, the 500GB model has 300 TBW endurance values, which is a decent value. This SSD is as fast or even twice to triple as fast as a regular SATA3 SSD, for the same amount of money. Paired with TLC written NAND and a 5-year warranty this SSD this oozes value making this an attractive new option. We do need to remark that we're inclined to say that users who have heavy intensive workloads software like Abobe After Effects or something that writes a lot, to invest into something with better caches the SSD will lag behind there. But for the vast majority of applications, this is plenty fast given its price segment.

The SN500, and in specific the 500GB model fills a gap in the market where not many others are active, in fact only the Corsair MP300, Crucial P1, and the Intel 660p come to mind here. Based on an in-house controller and its own SanDisk NAND this shade of Blue pretty much is a no-brainer for some cheap yet relatively fast storage (500GB at €0,165 per GB). I would love to see a 1TB model at these prices though. Hey WD, hint ;-)

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