To the editors of the portal Gamemag.ru a solid state drive from the company Western digital – WD Blue SN550 500 GB (WDS500G2B0C). This is an NVMe SSD with PCIe Gen3 x4 for the M.2 slot.
On sale there are versions of 250 GB (4,000 rubles), 500 GB (6,000 rubles) and 1 TB (10,000 rubles).
The device comes in a cardboard box in a blue and white design with a small window on the back. Inside the drive lies in a plastic case, which gives additional protection during transportation.
Nearby lies a booklet with information on technical support and a 5-year limited warranty.
Standard dimensions for the M.2 SSD are 80 mm x 22 mm x 2.38 mm. The device will fit into a laptop without any problems.
The WD Blue SN550 stands out with its blue printed circuit board design. Otherwise, the appearance is ordinary.
The manufacturer claims sequential read speeds of up to 2400 MB / s and sequential write speeds of up to 1750 MB / s. For versions with 250 GB and 1 TB, the values are slightly smaller and slightly larger, respectively.
Operating temperature from 0 to 70 degrees Celsius.
My computer configuration:
- ASRock Z270 Gaming K4;
- Intel Core i7 7700 3.6 GHz;
- 16 GB RAM;
- ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1080 Ti;
- Windows 10 Pro
I tested the gadget in Crystal disk mark, Crystal disk info, AIDA64 and Anvil’s Storage Utilities. Tests gave indicators even a little better than the ones declared by the manufacturer. For example, in Crystal Disk Mark, a drive demonstrated 2485 MB / s for reading and 1812 MB / s on record.
But when copying the folder with the game “Metro: Exodus“(54.3 GB) from another NVMe SSD to WD Blue SN550, the speed is high at first, but then quickly drops to the level 410 MB / s, so the whole process took exactly 2 minutes. This is four times faster than copying to HDD, but two to three times less than other top NVMe SSD solutions on the market.
I got about the same thing when transferring the folder with the same game from SATA SSD to WD Blue SN550 – the process took 2 minutes 13 seconds.
In this case, the temperature of the device rises to 54 degreeswhich is 5-6 degrees higher than the SSDs of some other manufacturers, but lower than the flagship black series Western Digital WD BLACK SN750, which in the version without a radiator can heat up to 60 degrees (the black series also shows more impressive results in speed).
As for the test directly in games, I checked the WD Blue SN550 on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Game of the Year Edition at maximum graphics settings:
- Starting a new DLC game “Stone Hearts” from the main menu takes 21 second.
- Teleportation from the market square of Novigrad to the port of Oksenfurt – 4 seconds.
For comparison, for WD BLACK SN750 on the same system, these values were 17 and 4 seconds, respectively. That is, in fact, the WD Blue SN550 is still a bit slower in games, but not always.
Western Digital WD Blue SN550 – A good, but not the fastest SSD, which is especially noticeable during the transfer of a large number of heavy files and folders. In games, the difference with the tops is not so noticeable. Nevertheless, if you want to purchase a solid state drive, then this one is better to take at discounts. Either look at analogues from other manufacturers or the WD BLACK SN750 – it will be more expensive (sometimes slightly), but faster.
Read also: Review of Western Digital WD_BLACK P10 Game Drive 2TB – testing an external hard drive for PS4, Xbox One and PC.
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