Western Digital has succeeded in offering a range of storage solutions across media types and form factors, from selling only mechanical hard drives. We’re now far past the point where only enthusiasts would consider an SSD essential – it’s hard to find a laptop without one these days, and even high-capacity models aren’t out of reach for everyday users. Huh. The WD Blue lineup targets those who don’t want full top-end specifications, or who don’t have the latest hardware to take advantage. With its latest model, the WD Blue SN570, the company has stuck with the previous-gen standards to offer high capacity at reasonable prices.
The WD Blue SN570 succeeds the very popular WD Blue SN550, and slots in at the bottom of the performance-oriented (and similarly named) WD Black SN750, However, WD The M.2 SSD is not aimed at the very bottom of the market, where options such as Kingston NV1 exist (with non-guaranteed specifications). Blue Tier is meant to provide a balance of performance, reliability and cost. The 1TB unit we’re reviewing today could potentially be the only storage device you need in your next PC. It can also be a reasonably priced upgrade option if you only have a small SSD and are worried about running out of space.
WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD price in India
WD Blue SN570 Available only in the M.2 form factor, and there are three capacity options: 250GB, 500GB and 1TB. There’s no mention of a 2TB option (yet), which is surprising considering that the older SN550 is available in this capacity. In India, street prices start from Rs. 3,450 for the 250GB variant, up to Rs. 4,750 for 500GB. These figures are only slightly higher than the older SN550s that still sell. The 1TB variant we are reviewing today has a retail price of around Rs. 8,350.
WD ships this SSD in a relatively large cardboard box with an internal plastic shell for protection in transit. All three versions have a five-year warranty. The company’s website says buyers will get a free copy of Acronis True Images for Western Digital, a backup and cloning tool (for Windows or macOS), as well as a one-month Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. You also get WD’s own dashboard utility – more on this later. None of this software is mentioned on the product box, so you may have missed it if you don’t know if it is available.
The back of the WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD is completely blank, making it thin enough for a laptop
WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD (1TB) Specifications & Features
All of today’s performance-focused NVMe SSDs have rapidly adopted PCIE 4.0 specificationand PCIe 5.0 SSDs are shown running on very latest motherboard, This may be overkill for average users and beyond a certain point the benefits are modest in everyday use. So WD is stuck with PCIe 3.0 for the new WD Blue SN570. It will be widely compatible with most of the laptops and desktop PCs having M.2 slot.
Speaking of compatibility, the single-sided M.2 2280 module has no attached heatsink, so it will fit even in physically tight spaces, such as thin and light notebooks. The module itself is surprisingly barebones, with only a flash chip and controller, and a small handful of surface-mount components for power conditioning. I expect WD to offer this drive in the more compact 2230 and 2242 sizes which are now being used Even in small devices. Interestingly, WD’s press shots showed a sleek looking label covering the entire upper surface of the module, but my review unit was largely bare with only a small sticker.
WD used sister company of sandisk 112-layer TLC flash, which is slightly denser than the SN550’s 96-layer flash. This makes sense, as companies tend to phase out older SSD models when production volumes and prices shift in favor of newer types of flash. The controller also has a SanDisk logo, but parent company Western Digital isn’t saying much about its specifications. There is no discrete DRAM cache, but some part of the storage space can be allocated in SLC mode which speeds up writes.
Peak sequential read and write speeds are higher than those of the older WD Blue SN550. The company now promises up to 3500MBps reads and 3000MBps writes for the 1TB version, though it goes all the way up to 3300MBps reads and 1200MBps writes for the 250GB version). Rated endurance scales proportionally: 150TBW for the 250GB model, 300TBW for the 500GB model, and 600TBW for the 1TB. These figures refer to the minimum number of terabytes that can be written to each drive in total, which works out to about 328GB per day over the five-year warranty period—far more than most consumers need.
There is no mention of encryption on the spec sheet. Power consumption is rated to max 3.5W under load and as low as 5mW in sleep mode.
WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD (1TB) Performance
While this may be a mainstream SSD, the new WD Blue SN570 matches some of the higher-end models from years ago in terms of rated maximum speed. I put it through a few benchmarks to see how it fared in the real world. The test rig included a AMD Ryzen 7 2700X CPU, 1 Gigabyte Aorus X470 Gaming 7 Wifi Motherboard2x8GB G.skill DDR4 RAM, a 1TB Samsung SSD 860 Evo boot drive, a Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 590 graphics card, and a Corsair RM650 power supply. I used Windows 10 20H2 with all the latest drivers and patches.
The WD Blue SN570 (1TB) reported a formatted capacity of 931.51GB. CrystalDiskmark 6 reported sequential read and write speeds of 3495.3 Mbps and 2997.3 Mbps, respectively, more than what WD promised. Random read and write were also pretty strong, coming in at 1691.2MBps and 1214.6MBps respectively. The Anvil Storage benchmark showed read and write scores of 6228.61 and 7514.19, respectively.
These scores are about as good as one can get for PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs. That’s several times better than the best SATA SSD out there today, and of course the difference between this performance and a mechanical hard drive would be like comparing night and day. WD has managed to weed out older premium PCIe 3.0 options such as Kingston KC2500 And Data SX8200 Pro In terms of pricing.
Of course, keep in mind that these scores only apply to the 1TB version of the WD Blue SN570. Lower-capacity options are more likely to be popular, but buyers should adjust their expectations to match the maximum speed published on WD’s website.
As its name suggests, the WD Dashboard app shows detailed statistics about free space on the drive, operating temperature over time, and “life remaining” which is a somewhat reassuring representation of diagnostic data. Unfortunately, the app also shows a huge ad for other WD offerings. On other tabs you’ll find tools like real-time performance graphs, smart diagnostics, a Windows write caching override, and a secure eraser and firmware updater. Apart from ads, it is a well designed and feature rich SSD management app.
Dashboard shows app usage statistics and lets you run diagnostics
Decision
The WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD (1TB) can be an excellent choice for your desktop or laptop if you want a lot of space without spending a lot. This is especially true for older PCIe 3.0 platforms that are in line for an upgrade, as anything faster will be useless. Surprisingly, lower-end options like the Kingston NV1, which doesn’t perform very well, are selling for almost the same price. Even the older WD Blue SN550 isn’t significantly less expensive.
Of course many people today may prefer a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD like one of WD’s black models, and it makes more sense if you’re building a high-performance PC with current-day specifications. You may notice some differences when loading game levels with high-resolution textures, or importing huge video files to work in an editor. For general daily use, or even as a secondary SSD, the WD Blue SN570 (1TB) is one of the best options in terms of balancing cost and performance.
WD Blue SN570
Prices (MOP):
250GB: Rs. 3,450
500GB: Rs. 4,750
1 TB: Rs. 8,350
professionals
- good overall performance
- useful bundled software
- five year warranty
- good value for money
Shortcoming
Rating (out of 5)
- Display: 4
- Value for money: 4.5
- Overall: 4.5
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