As one of the few remaining giants of the hard drive space (alongside Seagate and Toshiba), Western Digital (WD) ships plenty of drives, both in pre-built laptops and desktops, and as bare drives for everything from servers to DIY system builds. But every company needs to look to the future, and the future of of hard drives, at least on the consumer front, doesn't look all that shiny.
Between the shift to cloud-based storage and the rapid adoption of solid-state drives (SSDs), spinning-platter storage doesn't look like a major growth market down the line. SSDs provide much faster throughput, and tiny form factors like M.2 for ever-thinner laptops and convertibles like Asus' recent superslim ZenBook 3. Indeed, as AnandTech noted earlier in 2016, hard drive shipments, in fact, fell 17 percent in 2015.
So it was unsurprising, then, that Western Digital bought SanDisk, a major flash-storage maker (and SSD heavyweight) toward the end of 2015. Western Digital has dabbled in solid-state storage a bit before, most notably with its WD Black2 Dual Drive, which managed to jam both an SSD and a hard drive into the shell of a typical 2.5-inch drive. But that was back in 2014, and since the company finalized its acquisition of SanDisk earlier in 2016, those who follow the storage space have been wondering when we'd see the first SSDs to result from the combination of the two companies.
Well, the WD Blue SSD that we're looking at here is the first of a pair of families of new WD-branded SSDs, and the more performance-oriented of the two. The WD Green SSD is more of a budget-oriented line that will be aimed at the low-cost OEM and entry-level market, for those upgraders who just want a solid replacement for a spinning-platter hard drive at a low price. These two drives are the first proper client- and consumer-focused SSDs to come from Western Digital. And with SanDisk now a subsidiary of WD, they almost certainly won't be the last.
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While the WD Blue SSDs are the speedier of the company's two new SSD sets, the company didn't design it to blow away benchmarks. As a Serial ATA-based drive, it won't be going head-to-head with PCI Express-bus, NVMe-equipped options such as the roaringly fast Samsung SSD 950 Pro. And it's not aiming to take on the best 2.5-inch SATA drives, either, like the fairly expensive Samsung SSD 850 Pro, either. Instead, a company rep told us that the WD Blue SSD will attempt to balance performance and affordability, much like the Samsung SSD 850 EVO does today, and the SanDisk Ultra II drive did when it debuted a couple of years back.
The WD Blue SSD will also be a good fit (in a literal sense) for plenty of today's PCs, as it will ship in both 2.5-inch and M.2 (Type 2280) form factors, as well as at 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB capacities. All three capacities are available in both of the form factors. (See our explainer and guide The Best M.2 Solid-State Drives of 2016 for more on M.2-related lingo.) WD sent us the 1TB 2.5-inch model for testing.
Design and Features
As the plain-looking label on the 2.5-inch models reflects, there's not much (or anything, really) in the way of ground-breaking features happening with the WD Blue SSD. It's a SATA-based drive, 7mm thick in the 2.5-inch form factor that we tested, and the drive uses SanDisk's 15nm triple-layer-cell (TLC) NAND flash, with fast single-level-cell (SLC) style caching (again, a feature similar to recent competing drives). The NANDs work alongside a Marvell-made controller that WD says has been tuned precisely for this drive. And, as we'll see later in testing, one anomaly aside, the WD Blue is precisely tuned.
The drive's three-year warranty is also par for the course with SSDs in this price range, although the Samsung SSD 850 EVO, which costs a bit more, does ship with five years of coverage.
Endurance shouldn't be an issue with the WD Blue SSD, so long as you're not plugging the drive into a server (which no drive in this price range is built for). WD rates the 250GB WD Blue SSD at 100TB of total writes, which should be enough to get most consumers through a decade or more of use. The 500GB drive doubles that endurance to 200TB, and the 1TB drive we tested is rated to handle up to 400TB of writes. We'd be shocked if the SATA interface that this drive is built around is still in regular use by the time anyone manages to write that much data to this drive under regular consumer/enthusiast workloads. Even power users rarely write much more than about 10TB of data to a drive in a year, unless they're heavily into high-resolution video editing or deal with big RAW image files.
WD also says the Blue SSDs (as well as the WD Greens) boast an industry-leading 1.75 million hours MTTF (mean time to failure), thanks in part to the company's Functional Integrity Testing (F.I.T.) Lab certification process. Without a time machine, that's not exactly something we can test. But it's certainly reasonable that these drives might benefit from Western Digital's 46 years of storage expertise and its extensive testing facilities.
Software
The WD Blue SSD doesn't ship with any drive-cloning software, which is a shame because the lower-priced Crucial MX300 SSD includes a key for Acronis' handy True Image utility for that purpose. The lack of software for cloning/drive migration may complicate the installation process for novice users who intend to transfer a boot-drive installation to their new SSD. But you can easily download free programs that can accomplish the drive-cloning task, such as Macrium Reflect Free.
Western Digital does provide a handy program, WD SSD Dashboard, for the WD Blue drive. You'll have to grab it from the drive's product page, though we couldn't find a direct link when we wrote this before just before the drive's launch.
WD SSD Dashboard
WD SSD Dashboard is an obvious port of SanDisk's SSD Dashboard software. In fact, the icon it created on our desktop when we installed it was of a black drive, with red SanDisk-style lettering. And before an initial update, a SanDisk drive was shown in the upper-left corner of the software's main page, seen above.
There's no shame in porting SanDisk's drive utility, though, because it's quite good, if not much of a functional departure from similar utilities from Intel, Crucial, and Samsung. The main Status page provides a clean overview of remaining capacity, allocated and unallocated space, endurance levels, drive temperature, and interface connection (so you can be sure you're connected over a 6Gbps SATA port for optimal performance). Other tabs include a tab to measure performance, a Tools section that's just about checking for new firmware, and a Settings tab that, for the moment, just lets you know if there's a new version of the WD SSD Dashboard program available.
The WD Dashboard software still needs a bit of work, however. When we wrote this, the Help tab had placeholders for the manual, support page, and support forums. A rotating list of ads for WD products, on the right edge, however, worked perfectly. It repeatedly served up a link to buy the very same WD Blue SSD we were testing. We have a feeling the WD SSD Dashboard utility will see an upgrade—to clean up the leftover SanDisk-centric visuals, and add support sections—in the coming days or weeks.
As noted up top, the WD Blue will ship in three capacities at launch, with the 250GB model starting at $79, the 500GB model at $139, and the 1TB model we tested listing at $299. (These are prices for the 2.5-inch drives. On the day of launch, some of the M.2 versions were selling on WD's online shop at a slight premium.) That pricing nicely undercuts that of the Samsung SSD 850 EVO, especially at the lower capacity, with that drive currently selling for about $99 for the 250GB capacity, about $160 for 500GB, and $307 for 1TB. The Samsung drive ships in more capacities, though, starting at 120GB, and going all the way up to 4TB. (We currently have a review of the 4TB Samsung SSD 850 EVO in the works, so stay tuned if you need truly capacious solid-state storage.)
While the WD Blue's pricing looks good against the SSD 850 EVO, there are plenty of perfectly competent lower-end solid-state drives available that sell for less. The most recent example would be Crucial's MX300, which sells for just $69 for the 275GB model, and $249 for the 1TB model. We recently looked at the 1TB version of the MX300 and found quite a lot to like, giving it an Editors' Choice for budget solid-state storage.
Priced in between two excellent drives, and with plenty of other decent options in this extremely crowded, price-sensitive market, the WD Blue SSD has plenty to prove if it wants to compete on performance and value. Let's see if the drive is up to the task.
Performance Notes
If you're new to the world of SSDs, a few things are worth noting when it comes to performance.
For starters: If you're upgrading from a standard spinning hard drive, any modern SSD will be a huge improvement, speeding up boot times and making programs launch faster. Most of today's high-end 2.5-inch SSDs make use of a specific interface, SATA 3.0 (also called "6Gbps SATA"), to achieve maximum speed versus older, but still common, SATA 2 ports, which top out at 300MB per second. We test all our SSDs on a SATA 3.0-equipped test-bed PC to show their full performance abilities. To get the most speed possible from modern drives, you'll need a system with SATA 3.0 capability, as well.
If your system is based on an Intel chipset later than those supporting 2nd-Generation "Sandy Bridge" processors (or one of the newer AMD chipsets), your laptop or desktop probably has this interface. Be sure before buying, though. If your system is creaky and doesn't have SATA 3.0 support, there's little point in paying a premium for a drive with the maximum possible performance. SATA 3.0-capable drives will work just fine with previous-generation SATA ports, and there's scant reason to pay extra for drive speed that your system can't take advantage of. Any basic current SSD will work just as well, in that SATA 3.0-less scenario.
PCMark 7 (Secondary Storage Test)
The Secondary Storage Test is a subtest under Futuremark's larger PCMark 7 benchmarking suite. It employs a different approach to drive testing than pure speed tests like AS-SSD, which we'll get to next. PCMark 7 runs a series of scripted tasks typical of everyday PC operation and disk accesses. It measures app launches, video-conversion tasks, image import, and more. The result is a proprietary numeric score; the higher the number, the better.
This score is useful in gauging general performance versus other drives. Note that, like with our 10GB File Copy Test, we secure-erase all SSDs before running PCMark 7's Secondary Storage Test.
On this first test, the WD Blue SSD looks good, and seems to be threading the performance needle as we'd expect based on its pricing, landing just below the Samsung SSD 850 EVO on our chart of recent drives, and above the 1TB Crucial MX300.
AS-SSD (Sequential Read & Write Speeds)
The benchmark utility AS-SSD was designed specifically to test SSDs (as opposed to traditional hard drives). This setting within AS-SSD measures a drive's ability to read and write large files. Drive makers often quote these speeds, as a theoretical maximum, on the packaging or in advertising.
Sequential speeds are important if you're working with very large files for image or video editing, or you play lots of games with large levels that take a long time to load with traditional hard drives. We secure-erase all SSDs before running this test.
On our sequential-read test, the WD Blue tumbled a ways down our chart, but it still managed to best the 1TB version of the Crucial MX300 drive, and keep its nose just above the 500MB-per-second mark.
When it comes to large-file writes, though, the WD Blue landed close to the bottom among the 15 SATA-based drives we've tested recently. Its placement here is above the older SanDisk Ultra II (which has now been on the market for over two years), but not by much. The 1TB Crucial MX300, meanwhile, was about 40MB per second faster on this test.
AS-SSD (4K Read & Write Speeds)
This test, also a part of the SSD-centric AS-SSD benchmark, measures a drive's ability to traffic small files. Often overlooked, 4K performance, particularly 4K write performance, is important when you're talking about boot speed and program launch times.
When booting up your system or launching programs, many tiny files get accessed and edited frequently. The faster your drive can write and read these kinds of files (especially dynamic link library, or DLL, files in Windows), the faster your OS will "feel." Since these small files are accessed much more often than large media or game-level files, an SSD's showing on this test will have a greater impact on how fast it feels in ordinary use.
Things looked up for the WD Blue when it came to small-file reads, with the drive landing closer to the SSD 850 EVO than the Crucial MX300. The latter drive languished near the bottom of our charts here.
On small-file writes, the WD Blue essentially tied the Crucial MX300, hovering around the 100MB-per-second mark. Samsung's entry-level SSD 750 EVO drive still did slightly better here, though.
Anvil's Storage Utilities
Anvil's Storage Utilities is, like AS-SSD, an SSD-specific set of drive benchmarking tests. We'll report here the Overall Score, which is derived from the test's Read and Write scores with the utility run at default settings.
Once again, the WD Blue managed to edge out the Crucial MX300 here, and it stuck fairly close to costlier premium drives like the Samsung SSD 850 Pro. Samsung's lower-end SSD 750 EVO again did somewhat better here, though.
Crystal DiskMark (QD32 Testing)
Crystal DiskMark uses incompressible data for testing, which stresses most modern SSDs quite a bit since they rely on data compression to achieve their maximum level of performance. This particular test is designed to replicate the duties of an SSD located inside a Web server, asked to perform a smattering of small reads. While it's reading these files, a queue of 32 outstanding requests is lined up. That's typical of a high-volume Web server, which has to fulfill requests flying in all at the same time from various clients.
Once again, the WD Blue repeated its performance pattern on this test, wedging itself between the Crucial MX300 and the Samsung SSD 850 EVO, while sticking closer to the latter (slightly costlier) drive than the budget-minded MX300.
For the first time here, the WD Blue found itself at the bottom of our benchmarks, delivering the poorest performance we've seen on this test among recent drives. That being said, this is likely down to firmware tuning. This test taxes a drive in a way consumers and content creators generally won't, but more like a server would. As is generally the case for all drives in this price range, the WD Blue SSD is definitely not designed to to run a Web server.
Conclusion
Aside from unimpressive sequential-write performance in our benchmark tests, which was about 50MB per second off the fastest SATA-based drives we've tested, the WD Blue SSD seems precisely tuned in a price/performance sense. It landed between the budget-priced Crucial MX300 and the costlier Samsung SSD 850 EVO on almost all of our tests, usually sticking closer to the Samsung drive than the Crucial. That alone tells us that Western Digital (and its now-subsidiary SanDisk) put a lot of thought into how to position the WD Blue SSD in this extremely competitive market.
At $299 for the 1TB model we tested, the WD Blue SSD is well-priced, undercutting the Samsung SSD 850 EVO slightly at the top capacity. But at the 250GB capacity, the WD drive costs about $20 less. And these are launch prices. We'd expect pricing to drop once the WD Blue SSD settles into the market, while the Samsung drive will more likely remain about where it is. Samsung has, after all, been churning out the SSD 850 EVO since the end of 2014.
Enthusiasts and upgraders may want to pay a little more for the SSD 850 EVO, or a little less for the Crucial MX300—especially given the WD drive's disappointing sequential-write performance on our tests. But the WD Blue SSD still performs quite well overall, besting the lower-priced MX300 on most of our tests. And Western Digital will likely sell the majority of these drives to its OEM client base, who are used to working with the company on the hard drive front.
For those customers, WD really just needed to deliver a drive that's competitive, both on price and performance. While we'd like to see better sequential-write results, the WD Blue SSD stuck close to 450MB per second on that front, which isn't awful. And on the rest of our benchmark tests, it performed quite well for a drive priced just above the bargain-hunting budget drives (where the WD Green drive will compete), but below drives like the SSD 850 EVO and the premium-priced Samsung SSD 850 Pro.
The real limitation with the WD Blue SSD is capacity. We're fine with the company skipping the 120GB capacity (leaving that capacity to its lower-end WD Green drives). But with pricing in this market becoming ever more reasonable for higher-capacity offerings, and Samsung delivering both 2TB and now 4TB drives in the EVO line, we'd like to see WD offer up at least a 2TB option in the near future. Sometimes, 1TB of storage just isn't enough.
WD's first SSD since its acquisition of SanDisk nicely threads the performance-and-price needle. This is a solid first showing that should satisfy most consumers who aren't obsessed with benchmarks and maximum possible speed.
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