WD Blue SN550 1TB NVMe SDD Review

File Transfer, File Read and Document Open

Real World File Transfer

Let’s see how real-world performance was when writing a movie folder containing seven 1080P movies over to the SSD. For this test, we are going to measure write performance by copying a 30.6GB folder of movies off from the drive being tested back to itself to see how performance looks. This action is basically a long linear sequential write operation and punishes the SLC Cache on many drives.

The WD Blue SN550 1TB drive finished our custom file transfer test at 744.7 MB/s, which is solid for an entry-level NVMe SSD.

Custom Read File Test

The next custom test that we are going to do is how fast each drive can read a compressed folder. For this we backed up a Steam copy of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds for the test file. The compressed folder contains 59 titles and is 27.3 GB (29,409,916,771 bytes) in size.

When it comes to reading a compressed Steam Backup file the SN550 1TB drive finished with an average read speed of 1602.6 MB/s. This is the best score that we have seen from what we would consider an entry-level NVMe drive.

Document Open Test

We wanted to record the time it takes to open an application and came to the conclusion that using WordPad was one of the best choices for this. WordPad is a basic word processor that is included with almost all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 onwards. It is more advanced than Microsoft Notepad and most have used it form time to time. The reason we selected this application to benchmark in the LR SSD test suite is because it is seldom updated and delivers consistent results.

When it comes to opening up a text document with pictures the WD Blue SN550 was actually the slowest of all the NVMe drives that we have recently tested. The good news is that you are only talking about a tenth of a second here and not many people are going to notice that.