WD Blue SN550 1TB NVMe SDD Review

AJA System Test and PCMark 8

AJA System Test:

AJA System Test by AJA Video Systems measures system disk performance using video test files of different resolutions, sizes and codecs. We selected the standard 4K UltraHD resolution, a test file size of 1GB and the ProRes 4444 codec to see how this drive does with regard to video rendering performance. ProRes 4444 is used for heavy effects work and deep color projects. The results from this benchmark help content creators with regards to rendering expectations, throughput, file read/write expectations for transfers and that kind of thing.

Benchmark Results: The AJA System Test results on the WD Blue SN550 1TB drive were 2,146 MB/s read and 1,919 MB/s write.

PCMark 8:

PCMark 8 might have come out in 2013, but it is still a very popular storage benchmark and some would argue that it is the industry standard for SSDs. We ran the Storage 2.0 benchmark test suite on PCMark 8 v2.10.901 that came out in May 2018. This update accommodates a change in the latest version of Adobe After Effects and provides better support for NVMe SSDs. The changes affect the workloads in the Adobe Applications benchmark and the Storage 2.0 benchmark. Scores from the new versions of these tests should not be compared with older versions, so just a heads up if you wanted to compare our scores to that on another site.

The primary result of each storage test is the total time elapsed while playing back the trace. The primary result is used to calculate Storage score. The secondary result of the test is bandwidth, which is the total amount of bytes read and written during the test divided by busy time (in other words, the time when the depth of the queue of pending I/O operations was at least 1). The bandwidth result is used to calculate Storage bandwidth, which is reported along with Storage score and we are most interested in this score.

Benchmark Results: The WD Blue SN550 1TB Drive completed the PCMark 8 storage 2.0 benchmark workload with an overall score of 5,085 points and a bandwidth result of 573.25 MB/s. Respectable scores from an entry-level drive!

The WD Blue SN550 1TB drive turned out performing better than all the other entry-level drives on this test and even managed to best some mainstream drives like the HP EX950 1TB.

We like the Storage 2.0 Bandwidth test results as it shows the total amount of bytes read and written during the test divided by the time the test took. The SN550 1TB SSD had a storage bandwidth score of 573.3 MB/s and that is a solid score for a drive of this price point.