Western Digital Blue SN550, M.2

Eine schnelle NVME-SSD ist heutzutage nicht mehr viel teurer als eine SATA-SSD, welche abgesehen von Festplatten noch immer die günstigsten internen Speichermedien sind. Western Digital macht dem Marktführer Samsung ordentliche Konkurrenz, indem die Kalifornier zuerst mit der WD Black SN750 eine High-End-SSD auf den Markt bringen und mit der WD Blue SN550 nun das preisbewusste Mittelfeld besetzen möchten. Im Test klären wir, wie eng die Nische zwischen SATA- und Top-NVME-SSDs ist.

There are some things that we wished we would have seen, however, even at this price range. For example, the SN550 does not support hardware accelerated AES-256 encryption, which its primary competition from AData supports. The similarly-priced AData Swordfish also has a much larger endurance rating of 960 TBW compared to the SN550's 600 TBW. As is often the case with budget-priced components, there's a series of trade-offs. The WD Blue SN550 had overall much higher performance than the Swordfish, which makes it a better candidate for a system drive.

The WD Blue series of SSDs offers an easy way into the world of M.2 NVMe storage without breaking the bank. Offering industry-standard endurance and solid performance in every area, even with no buffering DRAM present on the SSD, there's plenty to like from the Blue SN550 range that's backed up by a five-year warranty.

The WD Blue SN550 is the company’s newest entry-level NVMe SSD of the M.2 2280 form factor, featuring an in-house controller, firmware and their latest 3D NAND. Though certainly not on the same level as more premium consumer NVMe drives like the Samsung 970, the SN550 is still a good (and very affordable) option for users looking to improve overall system performance when compared to SATA SSDs and HDDs. The SN550 offered a huge step up in performance from the SN500 replaced, although it still lagged behind some other SSDs in its market segment. Looking at Application Workload Analysis performance, the SN550 recorded lower-end results for the consumer segment with 3,109.9 and 81.0ms for TPS and average latency, respectively, during SQL Server Output. The SN550’s placement in Houdini was 2,874.6 seconds, placing it in the bottom segment of the leaderboard. In 4K reads and writes, the WD drive showed lower-end results with 387K IOPS and 53K IOPS, respectively. Switching over to 64K reads, the SN550 showed a huge improvement with the former, posting an impressive 2.15GB/s, which easily took top spot. Writes, however, were at the lower end with 448MB/s. Our VDI benchmarks showed numbers well below the average with 39,128 IOPS for Boot, 9,608 IOPS for Initial Login, and 10,611 IOPS for Monday Login; the last two numbers were surprisingly less than the SN500 as well. Though the SN550 showed less than stellar results (with the exception of its impressive sequential read performance), the price-per-GB is really hard to beat for an NVMe drive, going for roughly $125 at the time of this review for the 1TB model. Moreover, those using the drive for general usage, casual gaming and upgrading from SATA-based system won’t see much of a real-world performance difference compared to higher-end drives.