Page 11 - Conclusion
When I further questioned my colleague Jonathan Kwan about why he took our friend to the expensive dealers in the first place, he explained in order to know what is good, we have to see what the best is so that we can judge with the right mindset. Only then can we make a fair and informed assessment about the options for vehicles. Obviously, it is still unfair to expect flagship performance from budget products, but this still shows us what the ceiling is. Similarly speaking, we did not just test the Western Digital Blue SN500 NVMe SSD 500GB against expected competition, but also against some of the best drives money can buy. Even so, we can see Western Digital did a great job at leveraging an in-house controller and NAND technology to produce an excellent performance-to-price drive. Some compromises were made to keep this drive cheap, including only utilizing two lanes on the PCI Express Gen. 3 standard. In performance metrics, we saw struggles in areas such as the slower ramp-up for smaller packet transfers and lower peak sequential speeds. As we have already mentioned, the Blue lineup is targeted at the general consumer base rather than the performance enthusiast, so it is no surprise its older brother, the WD Black SN750, is much faster. However, the WD Blue SN500 pulled out competitive numbers compared to other x2 NVMe SSDs. In simulation tests, the WD Blue SN500 NVMe SSD was more than capable. Furthermore, consistency testing showed this drive was steady across its phases, not varying much in terms of performance regardless if the drive was filled or not. This was a much better result than other drives at a similar price point. At a retail price of $65 USD, this is currently cheaper than the current price of the Crucial P1 500GB and Crucial MX500 500GB. Combine this with a better endurance rating and a five year warranty, the Western Digital Blue SN500 NVMe SSD 500GB is an intelligent choice for the general consumer looking for fast on the cheap.
Western Digital provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
APH equal.balance Award
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
With the WD Blue SN500 NVMe SSD 500GB, Western Digital completes its NVMe SSD portfolio without many compromises.
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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
