Western Digital Blue SN500 NVMe SSD 500GB Review (Page 10 of 11)

Page 10 - Benchmark: PCMark 8

About PCMark 8

PCMark 8 is the latest version in our series of popular PC benchmarking tools. It is designed to test the performance of all types of PC, from tablets to desktops. With five separate benchmark tests plus battery life testing, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance. PCMark 8 is the complete PC benchmark for home and business.

From: Developer's Page



PCMark 8 Storage Consistency Test is one of our favorite benchmarks, but also one of the more taxing ones too. Nowadays, many drives are well optimized for high benchmark scores when they are empty, but what separates the professional players from the amateurs is how it stands up to a truly punishing workload. PCMark 8's Storage Consistency Test is designed exactly for this purpose. Going through five phases -- precondition, degradation, steady state, recovery, and clean up -- to extend beyond real world application simulations, this benchmark takes around two days to complete, but the results are revealing of a SSD's true capabilities.

Up to this point, the Western Digital Blue SN500 NVMe SSD 500GB has been on the lower end of the results, but practically all of these results were given with the drive being empty. With these tests, we can see what happens to the performance when the drive starts filling up. However, one of the best things you can see here is the fact that the Western Digital Blue SN500 NVMe SSD 500GB remains quite consistent through all of these phases. Obviously there are variances between the numbers, but they all keep within a range for degrade, steady, and recovery phases. Up to this point, we have been comparing the Blue SN500 to the Crucial P1, Gigabyte M.2, and the Toshiba RC100, so these are the three I decided to compare. As you can see, the numbers were not even close, with the Western Digital drive winning in every single competition. The drop-off for Crucial P1 was related to its poor performance with QLC NAND, which explains why it performed poorly after subsequent phases, compared to the TLC NAND flash on the WD Blue SN500. However, the other two graphs compare between all DRAMless solutions with some using host memory buffer. Obviously, these numbers did not come close to the WD Black SN750, but at this price point, it is great to see these results.


Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 6.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 9.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark 7
10. Benchmark: PCMark 8
11. Conclusion