Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

Yikes. Who is going to buy an M2 unit that is SATA3 based? Well, not a lot of people that's for sure, perhaps a very limited audience is interested in the M2 version as a cache drive. The SA500, unfortunately, does not make heaps of sense. If the M2 SSD would have had tremendously high endurance and TWB values my conclusion probably would have swayed the other way, but that simply that is not the case. For an M2 unit, the performance is acceptable at best. Will your NAS unit even take a SATA3 M2 SSD opposed to the NVMe standard? Well, please do check that carefully. Price isn't sexy either, I mean 150 USD is not hugely expensive of course, but with NVMe M2 units hovering at 12 cents per GB the NAS series SA500 seems priced too high compared to much faster M2 units with the same or even better TWB values. This SATA3 M2 SSD at 1Gb  offers 600 TBW, that's the same for the WD Blue SN550 that is 5x faster and even cheaper (but an NVMe M2).

Something to think about

The WD Red SA500, however, was designed specifically for NAS units with a bit of caching in mind. Herein is that another issue to be found, the M2 version we tested is driven over SATA3, and not NVMe (I'll keep repeating this until you get bored but aware of it). That means your NAS needs to be compatible and I assure you that the vast majority of the NAS units out there won't be M2 SATA3 compatible. In such a case the M2 unit would simply not work as a NAS does not offer you a BIOS mode where you can enable SATA3 protocol mode. That raises a big red flag as far as I am concerned. 

On the other side, WD also offers the WD Red SA500  with a regular SATA3 connector, and here the product makes much more sense with the performance level to match. I simply have no idea why this is not an NVMe compatible product. So the 500GB and 1GB versions are sitting at 15 cents per GB. However, it's slower than anything on NVMe. It is, however, TLC written NAND and WD will offer you a proper 5-years warranty. Endurance then, the TBW values are a bit on the shy side with 600 Terabytes written for the 1TB model. The performance as seen from a SATA3 SSD point of view is okay really, reasonably plenty for a NAS unit but pale in comparison to what you can achieve otherwise. NAND storage of course dramatically lowers access times and latency on a NAS.

Concluding

Let me close this review. The M2 version of the WD Red SA500 leaves me with questions; why SATA3 and not NVMe? For a NAS storage unit, why is endurance not higher? Why is this product not cheaper than some super-fast M2 NVMe units out there? All these facts combined make the SA500 a hard sell as an M2 unit. For the regular 2.5" SATA3 version with SATA3 connector the picture I paint here would be different, but there as well many other SATA3 SSDs would offer the same in not better for a lower price. We hope to see the next generation WD Red to be based on NVMe and to get higher TBW values, as really a NAS is the heart of your data infrastructure and you will want that sense of security. Obviously any SSD is likely 10x less likely to fail over a traditional HDD with all the mechanical moving parts. We do like the 5-year warranty, which we have to admit is worth a few extra bucks. Should you opt the WD Red SA500 as viable NAS storage, remember to check out whether or not your NAS can actually take a SATA3 over PCIe connected M2 unit, because most of them will only be able to handle NVMe, as that has been the trend for two years now. In closing, it is what it is, the SA500 in an M2 flavor does not manage impress as it is not ticking the right boxes, the 2.5" SSD version will make much more sense however at the cost of a NAS tray/drive slot.

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