Need a Budget-Friendly NVMe SSD – The WD Blue SN500 has you covered!
Need a Budget-Friendly NVMe SSD – The WD Blue SN500 has you covered!
While high-performance NVMe SSDs are all the rage, packing performance levels that are significantly higher than their SATA-based counterparts, it is easy to see why some PC builders still opt for SATA drives. SATA SSDs still offer more performance than the HDDs of older systems, and the capacity per pound (£) gains that SATA SSDs offer can be extremely compelling for budget constrained systems.Â
With their new WD Blue SN500, Western Digital plans to offer a middle ground between SATA SSDs and high-end NVMe storage, using in-house 3D NAND and a DRAM-less controller to deliver sequential reads and writes of 1,700 MB/s and 1,450 MB/s on their 500GB model. In the UK, Western Digital lists their 500GB Blue SN500 for £70. For context, Samsung’s 500GB 860 EVO SATA drive is currently £82.60 on Amazon. Â
On the lower-end Western Digital lists their 250GB model for £50, offering lower sequential write speeds of 1,300MB/s. This is still much faster than today’s SATA SSDs, but the 500GB model is where the good price/performance is at.Â
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Yes, the Western Digital Blue SN500 won’t be as fast as a Samsung 960 EVO, but it will stretch past SATA performance at a price tag that isn’t that much higher than cheaper SATA offerings. This makes this drive a great value offering, for those who cannot stretch their budget to high-performance NVMe drives or want to put their money into other areas of their system.Â
Our only problem with the WB Blue is the drive’s blue PCB. Yes, we understand that the drive is called “Blue”, but we’d imagine that aesthetically focused PC builders will want to hide this SSD under an NVMe heatsink or opt to purchase another budget-oriented NVMe SSD. A black PCB would have made this drive a lot more marketable to many PC enthusiasts.Â
You can join the discussion on Western Digital’s budget-oriented Blue SN500 SSD on the OC3D Forums.Â
