WD Blue SN570 1TB SSD Review

Rating: 8.0.

Hot on the heels of WD's latest NAS-focussed Red drive, the SN700, comes the newest addition to WD's mainstream Blue drive range, the WD Blue SN570. Priced at just £91.99 for the 1TB model, what does the SN570 have to offer in this extremely competitive market?

The new WD Blue SN570 line-up consists of three capacities at launch; 250GB, 500GB and the current flagship 1TB model, the drive we are reviewing here. It seems a little odd that there isn't a 2TB offering at launch, but the previous Blue SN550 model launched with the same three capacities as the SN570, with a 2TB model added at a later date so perhaps the same thing will happen to the SN570 product line.

WD has kept details of the controller and NAND very close to their chest (at the time of writing) but we presume that the controller is an improved version of the one that was used by the previous Blue SN550 and the NAND is the latest BiCS5, 112-layer 3D TLC NAND.

WD quote Sequential read figures for the three SN570 drives as up to 3,300MB/s for the 250GB drive and 3,500MB/s for both the 500GB and 1TB models, all three having faster read speeds than the previous SN550 which was rated up to 2,400MB/s across the range (excluding the 2TB drive). Sequential write performance is quoted as up to 1,200MB/s for the 250GB drive (up from 950MB/s for the SN550), 2,300MB/s for the 500GB drive (up from 1,750MB/s) and up 3,000MB/s for the 1TB drive (up from 1,950MB/s).

Random performance is quoted as up to 190,000 IOPS and 210,000 IOPS read/writes respectably for the 250GB drive, the 500GB drive gets figures of up to 360,000 IOPS for reads and up to 390,000 IOPS for writes while the 1TB drive is rated up to 460,000 IOPS and 450,000 IOPS for read and writes respectively.

WD quote an endurance figure for the 1TB drive of 600TBW with the 250GB drive rated at 150 TBW and a 300TBW figure for the 500GB drive. WD backs the range with a 5-year limited warranty.

Physical Specifications:

• Usable Capacities: 1TB.
• NAND Components: SanDisk BiCS5 112-Layer 3D TLC NAND?
• NAND Controller: WD in-house.
• Cache: none.
• Interface: PCIe Gen3 x4,  NVMe 1.4.
• Form Factor: M.2, 2280.
• Dimensions: 22 x 80 x 2.38mm.
• Drive Weight: 6g.

Firmware Version: 234090WD.

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