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A lot of work and research has gone into the development of the new WD Blue SN500, which is reflected by the blend of performance and simplicity. With such a simple design, WD can bring the device to market at pretty low prices for an NVMe SSD, but without skimping out on quality. That makes it a good choice if you're looking to update to the latest tech.
Our testing shows that the Blue offers a clear advantage over SATA drives. With performance figures of up to 1.75 GB/s read and 1.3 GB/s write, the 250GB WD Blue SN500 leaves SATA drives in the dust. The top-end sequential performance is good, but we also saw performance improvements of up to 2-3x in real-world applications, too.
Performance isn’t all good, however. While WD found the small cache capacity to be plenty for most use cases, you will find yourself wanting for more if you have a heavy workload. But, then again, that’s what the beefier WD Black is for.
Like the WD Black, the WD Blue SN500 can be pretty power hungry at idle, although under load the power efficiency is very, very good. The drive also doesn’t come with secure erase or encryption support. But, while these may be deal breakers for the geekiest of tech geeks out there, most users will never notice.
The WD Blue SN500 competes with a wide range of SSDs, but, overall, it is a good product that's a solid value buy. We just wish WD had made drives with higher capacities. In either case, the 250GB and 500GB capacity points should be fine for small boot drives.
The WD Blue's pricing is quite attractive. The 250GB model will set you back just $54.99, or $0.22-per-GB, while the 500GB model is a much better value at just $23 more, or $0.16-per-GB. While SATA pricing is leading the way to the bottom, the WD Blue SN500 still manages to undercut the Samsung 860 EVO at the time of writing and is only a few dollars more than the WD Blue 3D. If you are in the market for a new NVMe SSD for your system build and are budget-oriented, give the new WD Blue SN500 a look.
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