Finally come the copy tests. While at first these numbers might look low compared to the straight sequential-throughput numbers achieved in benchmarks like Crystal DiskMark 6.0 and AS-SSD, that's due to the way this score is calculated. However, it should be noted, that these two tests don't tell the whole story of how a drive will perform for all creative applications. For example, cinema rendering programs like Cinema 4D may need to load dozens of different types of files at once, rather than just one large file like you might have encased in a Photoshop project or a movie that's being edited in Premiere. In contrast, the utility's 4K (or "random read/write") tests simulate typical processes involved in program/game launching... Here the drive is strong in 4K random write speeds, and competitive in random read. AS-SSD Copy Tests

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A WD Blue SATA Internal SSD can last up to 1.75M hours MTTF 2 (mean time to failure), with up to 600 TBW 3 (terabytes written), and has built in technology to correct errors in real time.Okay, off of PCMark 10 and onto a more traditional measure. The Crystal DiskMark 6.0 sequential tests simulate best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. Let's get into the drag races. TBW (terabytes written) values calculated using JEDEC client workload (JESD219) and vary by product capacity. The higher lane allocation puts the SN550 on par with most other mainstream M.2 drives nowadays. One place I'd like to see a bit more muscle, though, is in the terabytes written (TBW) rating. For example, the Editors' Choice-winning Addlink S70 almost exactly doubles the TBW rating of the WD Blue SN550, while costing only roughly a third more. This doesn't mean the WD Blue SN550 is a poor value, per se, just that it may not be the right choice for write-happy users, such as content creators who scribe lots of gigabytes of data per day to their drives. DRAM? Where We're Going, We Don't Need DRAM

Western Digital WD10EZEX 1 TB PC Hard Drive - Blue

In these traces, the WD Blue SN550 regularly scores in the top tiers of its competitors when launching games like Overwatch or COD, though it lagged slightly behind more gaming-oriented drives like the Seagate FireCuda 510 and TeamGroup T-Force Cardea II in Battlefield 5. Launching Creative Applications Here the drives are put through a very important test for creative types. As anyone who regularly works in programs like Adobe Premiere or Photoshop can tell you, oftentimes the most excruciating part of the whole experience is the time it takes for the program to launch. There are a lot of elements that creative applications need to load. The Western Digital Dashboard helps users maintain peak performance of the Western Digital SSD in Windows operating systems with a user-friendly graphical interface for the user. The Western Digital Dashboard includes tools for analysis of the disk (including the disk model, capacity, firmware version, and SMART attributes) and firmware updates.As used for storage capacity, one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment. While the sequential results of the WD Blue SN550 may not look tip-top on the surface, it seems WD was more concerned with real-world performance in the development of this drive, rather than just peak scores in spec sheets. Depending on the complexity of your work and the number of elements in a scene, your software may have to load 3D models, sound files, physics elements, and more. The overall PCMark 10 score of a drive will tell a better story for how a drive built to handle these types of programs will do than these numbers alone. But they're nonetheless interesting fodder for folks who live and breathe these Adobe apps.

1TB WD Blue 3D NAND Internal PC SSD - SATA Western Digital 1TB WD Blue 3D NAND Internal PC SSD - SATA

Overall, the WD Blue SN550 was well ahead of its cost-comparative competition, showing that its added lanes and high 4K random read speeds make it a great choice for all-around users. Booting Windows 10 In this test the WD Blue SN550 holds its own against pricier drives like the Patriot P300, while also keeping pace with performers like the Seagate and TeamGroup. Launching Games Based on read speed, unless otherwise specified. As used for transfer rate, megabyte per second (MB/s) = one million bytes per second. Performance will vary depending on your hardware and software components and configurations. As I alluded to in the introduction, the WD Blue SN550, like many other cheap SSDs, is a DRAM-less drive. For starters, let's define what DRAM is in an SSD context and what it's used for.The ultra-compact M.2 2280 WD Blue SATA SSD Drive goes through extensive compatibility and reliability testing to ensure it meets the high standards of the WD brand. Unlike those tests, which copy a file from another drive onto the testing drive and record the raw writing throughput to the drive (or reading capacity off of it to another drive), PCMark 10 is expressing the average bandwidth speed of a transfer when the file is on the same drive. If you're regularly moving files around on your drive from one folder to another, this test is a handy relative throughput measure.

WD Blue 3.5 HDD Product Brief: Western Digital WD Blue 3.5 HDD

One of the main upgrades from the older SN500 model that we tested last year is the increase in PCI Express lane allocation, which directly affects peak throughput. The WD Blue has gone from two lanes (PCI Express x2) in the previous model, a decidedly budget move, to four (PCI Express x4) in the SN550. That helps boost the top sequential read and write speeds from the SN500's 1,700MBps and 1,450MBps, respectively, to the SN550's numbers cited above. Here the drive finally starts to falter against some other drives we tested, but it actually exceeds (by a smidge) its WD-rated speeds in sequential reads and writes. Most of the drives we tested scored fairly even here, to the point where you only might notice a difference between the WD Blue SN550 and the Cardea II in applications like Adobe Premiere Pro with a stopwatch. Copy TestsBecause the data is moved around frequently, some SSDs use a smidge of DRAM—which is much faster to access and read than NAND flash—to "map out" the data, and provide a reference point for the drive so it knows where everything is. WD seems to have gotten around this hurdle with the addition of a much smaller SRAM chip ("static" RAM to DRAM's "dynamic" RAM). SRAM chips are faster than DRAM, though they can be more expensive to implement. WD also found a workaround for this, including just a few megabytes of SRAM on the in-house Western Digital controller, rather than the larger SRAM caches that you might see on other drives that implement a similar technique. First, there's the overall PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark. This score represents how well drives do throughout the entire PCMark 10 run, and are the sanctioned scores presented by UL's software at the end of each run. This score includes a weighted average of every simulated activity that the PCMark 10 storage test runs, from copying files to launching games, booting an OS to running creative applications. It's a general indicator of how consistently a drive can perform through 23 different usage scenarios. Though it's a bit difficult to put them up against one another 1:1 (the nature of the copied data is different in each case), the scores in the AS-SSD copy tests reiterate much of the same story we saw in the PCMark 10 run: the WD Blue holds its own. When It's Good to Be Kinda Blue Last up is a series of file and folder transfers done in the SSD benchmarking utility AS-SSD. This trio of tests involves copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another…