WD Blue 1TB SSD Review
Final Thoughts & Conclusions
The WD Blue 1TB SSD is the flagship drive of the WD Blue series and is yet another planar TLC NAND powered drive aimed at the mainstream market. At the very highest level, this is basically the SanDisk X400 drive that came out earlier this year with re-tuned firmware and no encryption support. The WD Blue 1TB drive has higher endurance ratings and 4K Random performance, but a lower warranty length and a higher price tag. It will be interesting to see in the future how WD will handle SanDisk and WD product offerings as there is obviously some overlap here at the beginning.
SanDisk X400 1TB versus WD Blue 1TB
| Model | SD8SN8U-1T00 | WDS100T1B0A |
| Capacity | 1TB | 1TB |
| Controller | Marvell 88SS1074 | Marvell 88SS1074 |
| NAND | Sandisk 15nm TLC | Sandisk 15nm TLC |
| Max Sequential Read | 545 MB/sec | 545 MB/sec |
| Max Sequential Write | 520 MB/sec | 520 MB/sec |
| Max Random Read | 95,000 IOPS | 100,000 IOPS |
| Max Random Write | 75,000 IOPS | 80,000 IOPS |
| Avg. Active Power | 70mW | 70mW |
| Max Write Power | 4,400 mW | 4,400 mW |
| TBW | 320 TB | 400 TB |
| MTBF/td> | 1.75M | 1.75M |
| Encryption | Yes | No |
| Warranty | 5-Years | 3-Years |
| Price in USD | $248.99 | $299.99 |
It feels like in every review we talk about how tough it is to stand out in a crowded SATA SSD market. The WD Blue series is basically just a firmware update of an existing product, so when comparing specs online you’ll see it similar to the aforementioned drive. These days the SATA interface is the main performance bottleneck, so brand loyalty is huge right now.
Our testing showed that we were able to hit 557 MB/s read and 536MB/s in the sequential benchmark (ATTO) and 98,800 IOPS read and 78,300 IOPS write (Anvil) for 4K QD32 random performance. These numbers are close to the drives rated speeds of 545/520 MB/s for sequential and 100k IOPS for random read and 80,000 IOPS for random write performance. Our sustained write testing showed that sequential writes bottomed out at an average speed of 307 MB/s after the SLC buffer was full and data was being written directly to the planar 15nm TLC NAND Flash.
WD Blue SSD 2.5″ SSD MSRP:
- 250GB – $79.99 ($0.32 per GB)
- 500GB – $139.99 ($0.28 per GB)
- 1TB – $299.99 ($0.30 per GB)
When it comes to pricing the WD Blue SSD series drives you are looking at between $0.28 and $0.32 per GB and that is actually on the lower-end of the price spectrum for mainstream drives. The 3-year limited warranty is average these days, but the 400 TB endurance rating (TBW) is above average for this series. While the WB Blue 1TB SSD MSRP is $299.99 MSRP we already found it available on Amazon for $279.99 shipped. The Crucial MX300 1TB SSD is $247.40, the SanDisk X400 1TB SSD is $248.99, the OCZ Trion 150 960GB SSD is $226.00 and the Samsung 850 EVO 1TB is $306.07. It will be interesting to see what the street pricing is on the WD Blue 1TB SSD in a couple of weeks as it will likely continue to drop down to around $250 price point as that is where the SanDisk X400 is and the performance of this drive puts it there.
Legit Bottom Line: The WD Blue SSD is high-end TLC SSD that offers enough performance to be targeted to the mainstream SSD market to compete with the base MLC drives.