Western Digital WD10EZEX 1 TB PC Hard Drive - Blue, Mechanical Hard Disk

Product Information

In a traditional SSD with DRAM, the data that you're keeping is stored on the NAND flash chips that sit on the drive's printed circuit board (PCB). The data isn't static, though, and is constantly being moved around by the drive to ensure that no cells are being taxed much more than others and therefore wear down unevenly. This is a process called "wear leveling." Depending on the complexity of your work and the number of elements in a scene, your software may have to load 3D models, sound files, physics elements, and more. The overall PCMark 10 score of a drive will tell a better story for how a drive built to handle these types of programs will do than these numbers alone. But they're nonetheless interesting fodder for folks who live and breathe these Adobe apps. In this test the WD Blue SN550 holds its own against pricier drives like the Patriot P300, while also keeping pace with performers like the Seagate and TeamGroup. Launching Games Overall, the WD Blue SN550 was well ahead of its cost-comparative competition, showing that its added lanes and high 4K random read speeds make it a great choice for all-around users. Booting Windows 10

WD Support Software and Firmware Downloads | WD Support

Most of the drives we tested scored fairly even here, to the point where you only might notice a difference between the WD Blue SN550 and the Cardea II in applications like Adobe Premiere Pro with a stopwatch. Copy Tests As I alluded to in the introduction, the WD Blue SN550, like many other cheap SSDs, is a DRAM-less drive. For starters, let's define what DRAM is in an SSD context and what it's used for. Finally come the copy tests. While at first these numbers might look low compared to the straight sequential-throughput numbers achieved in benchmarks like Crystal DiskMark 6.0 and AS-SSD, that's due to the way this score is calculated. As used for storage capacity, one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment. As used for storage capacity, 1GB = 1 billion bytes and 1TB = one trillion bytes. Actual user capacity may be less, depending on operating environment.Here the drive is strong in 4K random write speeds, and competitive in random read. AS-SSD Copy Tests

WD Blue SN570 NVMe™ SSD | Western Digital WD Blue SN570 NVMe™ SSD | Western Digital

Right out of the gate, the WD Blue SN550 proves itself as a very fast option (alongside the ADATA Spectrix S40G) if you're regularly shifting around programs or ISO files of the kind in these PCMark 10 traces. JPEG copying was considerably slower, but still competitive for its cost. Crystal DiskMark 6.0 WD seems to have gotten around this hurdle with the addition of a much smaller SRAM chip ("static" RAM to DRAM's "dynamic" RAM). SRAM chips are faster than DRAM, though they can be more expensive to implement. WD also found a workaround for this, including just a few megabytes of SRAM on the in-house Western Digital controller, rather than the larger SRAM caches that you might see on other drives that implement a similar technique.The higher lane allocation puts the SN550 on par with most other mainstream M.2 drives nowadays. One place I'd like to see a bit more muscle, though, is in the terabytes written (TBW) rating. For example, the Editors' Choice-winning Addlink S70 almost exactly doubles the TBW rating of the WD Blue SN550, while costing only roughly a third more. This doesn't mean the WD Blue SN550 is a poor value, per se, just that it may not be the right choice for write-happy users, such as content creators who scribe lots of gigabytes of data per day to their drives. DRAM? Where We're Going, We Don't Need DRAM