Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
In terms of appearances, the Western Digital Blue SN570 NVMe SSD looks very similar to its older, previous generation of drives in the family. In fact, if you compare it to the SN550, you will notice the major difference between the new one and the older one is the size of the label, as the SN570 has a smaller label to expose more of the board. Similar to the previous version, the SN570 has placed the NAND chip away from the controller to improve thermal performance.
From a physical perspective, the Western Digital Blue SN570 NVMe SSD is an M.2 2280 SSD. The "2280" physical standard refers to its physical size of 22mm by 80mm. The components are located on the dark teal printed circuit board to the side of the label, which we will take a closer look at soon. The WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD 1TB works on the NVMe 1.3 logical device interface and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, this M.2 NVMe drive interfaces with PCIe 3.0. The SN570 uses up to four lanes for a theoretical maximum of 4000MB/s bandwidth in each direction. The specified weight is a light 6.5g for this drive. The Western Digital Blue SN570 comes in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB capacities.
The sticker of the Western Digital Blue SN570 NVMe SSD 1TB is directly on the printed circuit board, which means all of the components are exposed. There are two main components to take note of. The first is the SanDisk branded controller of the drive, labeled 20-82-10048-A1. This is a NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to overcome traditional SATA bottlenecks. There is no memory found on the drive itself, but rather the memory for the controller is located within the controller. This is a bit of a disadvantage to have no DRAM, as this can affect prolonged read and write performance. To alleviate this, some SSDs without DRAM may utilize HMB, or host memory buffer, and allocate some of the system's memory as a buffer location for faster access compared to flash NAND access. The SN570 does in fact take advantage of this, so we will see the effects of this during our tests.
The larger black chip, the WD Blue SN570's flash NAND memory, is a SanDisk-branded 112-layer BiCS5 3D triple-level cells chip. Its total rated write endurance is 600TBW, which equates to about 329GB per day for five years. This is really impressive for a consumer drive, as it boasts the same drive writes per day, or DWPD, as other higher end Western Digital SSDs. The Blue SN570 1TB's rated power consumption is slightly tweaked from last year, with a higher 30mW low power, lower 3.5W peak power, and similar 5mW sleep. These are all still very efficient numbers for an NVMe drive. 24GB out of the 1024GB total capacity -- just under 3% -- is provisioned for the drive controller for overhead, so the actual usable space is 1TB, as advertised. You will see 931.5GB in Windows available for use. On the back side, you will see there are no components or labels of interest.
Specified at 3500MB/s read, 3000MB/s write, and up to 460K IOPS over NVMe 1.3 on PCIe 3.0 x4, these figures are once again a notable step up from the SN550, although these are still not exactly mind-blowing numbers. This is still quite a bit faster than SATA 6Gb/s solid state drives. To see how it translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit this middle of the ground SSD against other PCI Express based SSDs from popular manufacturers like ADATA, Crucial, Gigabyte, Kingston, Patriot, and Western Digital in the next seven pages or so.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-U9S chromax.black
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z170N-Gaming 5
RAM: Lexar Hades RGB DDR4-3600 2x16GB
Graphics: MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Titanium 8GB
Chassis: Thermaltake The Tower 100 Snow
Storage: Gigabyte UD PRO 256GB
Power: Cooler Master V850 SFX Gold 850W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Western Digital Blue SN570 NVMe SSD 1TB
- ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB
- Crucial P1 1TB
- Crucial P2 500GB
- Crucial P5 500GB
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
- Gigabyte AORUS RGB AIC NVMe SSD 512GB
- Kingston KC2500 1TB
- Kingston KC3000 1TB
- Patriot P300 512GB
- Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB
- Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB
- Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital Blue SN550 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK AN1500 2TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB
- XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB
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 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Conclusion
