WD Blue SN550 1TB NVMe SSD review - Specifications & Features

Specifications & Features

Much like the Black series SN500 the SN550 is using (Triple-level cell written) written NAND flash memory from Sandisk. Western Digital's in-house NVMe SSD controller architecture derives from SanDisk and was cut-down into a more affordable two PCIe lanes no DRAM interface design. This allows them to offer the big storage volume at a lower price point.  In 3D NAND, NAND cells in layers, not chips, are stacked in a single IC. The good news is continued cost reduction, smaller die sizes and more capacity per NAND chip. Also, installed NAND toolsets in the wafer fabs can, for the most part, be reused, thereby extending the useful life of the fab equipment. Though the numbers vary per model due to available NAND channels to the controller (big SSDs have more chips and channels to work with) these SSDs will be plenty fast for any regular performance metrics, offering double and even triple times the speed (depending on how you look at it) of the fastest SATA3 class SSD. As mentioned, Western Digital offers the product series in SKUs of 250GB, 500GB and 1TB

Specifications

	WD Blue SN550 250GB	WD Blue SN550 500GB	WD Blue SN550 1TB
Pricing	$48.99	$64.99	$109.99
Capacity (User / Raw)	250GB / 256GB	500GB / 512GB	1000GB / 1024GB
Form Factor	M.2 2280	M.2 2280	M.2 2280
Interface / Protocol	PCIe 3.0 x4 / NVMe 1.4	PCIe 3.0 x4 / NVMe 1.4	PCIe 3.0 x4 / NVMe 1.4
Controller	WD Architecture	WD Architecture	WD Architecture
DRAM	DRAMless	DRAMless	DRAMless
Memory	SanDisk 96L TLC	SanDisk 96L TLC	SanDisk 96L TLC
Sequential Read	2,400 MBps	2,400 MBps	2,400 MBps
Sequential Write	950 MBps	1,750 MBps	1,750 MBps
Random Read	170,000 IOPS	300,000 IOPS	410,000 IOPS
Random Write	135,000 IOPS	240,000 IOPS	405,000 IOPS
Endurance (TBW)	150 TB	300 TB	600 TB
MPN	WDS250G2B0C	WDS500G2B0C	WDS100T2B0C
Warranty	5-Years	5-Years	5-Years

The WD Blue SN550 is an NVMe 1.4-compliant controller product with the host over a PCIe 3.0 x4 link, which is a big advantage over the SN500 which had an x2 link only. on the controller side not a lot is known, however likely the same one as the SN750 is being used, just cut down from eight to four NAND channels in use.