WD Blue SN550 WDS500G2B0C 500 GB

Branded controller from Sandisk

The WD Blue SN550 is based on the latest Sandisk proprietary controller codenamed 20-82-01008-A1. Recall that WD bought SanDisk a few years earlier. Flash memory is represented by a single chip also manufactured by SanDisk.

Decent speed

The linear speeds of the WD Blue SN550, although not record-breaking, are still very worthy: 2400 MB / s for reading and up to 1750 MB / s for writing. And even after overflowing the virtual SLC-array, the sequential write speed remains quite high — about 900 MB / s. In this regard, it seriously outperforms the “low-cost” M.2 SSDs, which, when copying large files like game distributions and 4K movies, can drop down to a very limited 300-400 MB / s. At the same time, a high-quality controller paired with high-density memory allows WD Blue to process the smallest files at speeds up to 300,000 IOPS. Again, against the background of the top WB Black and Samsung EVO, these figures are not particularly impressive, but by the standards of inexpensive models, the figures are excellent. For people working with conditional databases, this is much more important than sequential write/read and buffer overflow problems.

Nothing extra

To keep the cost down, WD removed the metal heatsink from the drive and stripped it of its separate buffer RAM chip. We left a small buffer right in the controller. With a buffer, the solution is quite reasonable, there will still be drawdowns one way or another, any SSD suffers from this. And he doesn’t really need cooling, the heating level does not exceed 50 degrees Celsius with a continuous load. Plus, without a heatsink, it is easier to install it in a laptop or motherboard M.2 slot, which are often placed right next to the graphics card slot. But the five-year warranty was not cut to three years.