WoulD You Like Some NVMe Blues?
The First WD Blue NVMe SSD
If you drop by KitGuru you can see the WD Blue SN500 NVMe drive in action, and you can pick one up for $65 if you so desire. That price reflects the design, which uses PCIe x2 lacks a DRAM cache and is also evident in the performance. The SN500 struggles to keep up with PCIe 4x drives with a cache but also costs significantly less; for example their famous Black SN750 will cost you $108 for 500GB.
The results show the drive can hit 176,518 IOPS 4K random read and 197,828 IOPS random write, which still puts it in a class far above SATA drives, so if you have yet to experience an NVMe drive, this would be a great way to dip your toes in. You will probably never go back!
WD’s Blue SN500 is the first Blue labelled M.2 format drive to have an NVMe interface. It uses a combination of WD’s own in-house controller and 64-layer 3D TLC NAND. Coming in at less than £70, is this drive the perfect upgrade from your old SATA SSD?
