WD announced its first line up of SSDs at a global press conference in Prague a couple of weeks ago. The announcement came five months after it completed its acquisition of SanDisk.
The new WD Blue is being positioned as the mainstream SATA offering and is derived from the SanDisk X400. On paper, the new WD Blue SSDs feature sequential read speeds of up to 545MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 525MB/s.
The SSDs also feature 1.75M hours Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) and several error-correction technologies for lasting reliability. The SSDs are also optimized for multitasking to simultaneously run resource-heavy applications without system slow-down.
The drive is available in both 2.5-inch/7mm and M.2 2280 models. The one tested and reviewed here is the 2.5-inch variety. WD offers the new Blue SSDs in three large storage capacities – 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB. We received the 1TB variant for a review.
In terms of build quality, the Blue SSD come packed with the reliability that WD’s products are known for. The Blue SSD comes with a three-year warranty and accompanies WD’s SSD Dashboard software, which allows for firmware updates and monitoring of the drive’s status.
The performance of the WD Blue SSD is on par with most SATA-based SSDs available on the market. On Crystal Disk Mark benchmark, the WD Blue SSD was able to achieve an average read/write speeds of 472 and 518 megabytes per second respectively.
In our HD Tune benchmark, the WD Blue SSD was able to clock an average read speed of 348 megabytes per second. As you can see from the numbers, in terms of performance, the WD Blue SSD does its job. However, it is not as blazing fast as some of the SSDs that use the PCI Express standard. This is because, the WD Blue SSD uses a SATA interface.
WD also promises an endurance rating of 400 terabytes written. That’s much higher than many of its competitors on the market. That sort of an endurance rating is high enough that a typical user won’t exceed it for at least a decade. And that “typical user” is exactly the audience WD is looking for, with the Blue SSDs.
At a price tag of AED 1,098, the new WD Blue SSDs are priced a bit on the higher side. But if you really want to transition from HDDs to SSDs for your computer system, the WD Blue SSDs could be one the places you could start at.
Price: AED 1,098
