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In the world of solid-state drives (SSDs), where the performance floor is inherently fast, the amount of storage you get for the price becomes all the more important. Competitive pricing goes a long way, as Western Digital is demonstrating off the heels of its acquisition of SanDisk. At $299 for 1TB, the internal WD Blue SSD offers an attractive balance of price and speed that represents a strong value.
As a Serial ATA (SATA) drive, the Blue isn’t a premier-tier SSD in terms of performance. That means that, although it’s quick, it’s not on par with something as lightning-fast as the PCIe, NVMe-equipped Samsung SSD 960 Pro , nor is it trying to match the fastest SATA drives like the Samsung SSD 850 Pro . Sticking with the Samsung comparisons, it’s more akin to the Samsung SSD 850 EVO , opting to thread the needle of speed and price rather go all-in for performance.
Given that, the WD Blue SSD isn’t really innovative or category-changing. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. The Blue SSD comes in the standard 2.5-inch form factor and is 7mm thick, using SanDisk’s 15nm triple-layer-cell (TLC) NAND flash with single-level-cell (SLC) caching. The 1TB-capacity drive (it’s also available at 250GB for $99 and 500GB for $139) is rated for 100TB worth of writes, which should last a decade or more, so don’t worry about wearing out this drive in a reasonable amount of time. On a related note, WD provides a three-year warranty—again standard, but an acceptable and useful support length.
The Blue SSD is compatible with a handy program called WD SSD Dashboard, which you’ll have to download from the product page. For what it’s worth, this is a clear imitation of SanDisk’s SSD software, another area where the acquisition has been beneficial. Here you can monitor the drive’s storage capacity, check its status (including life span and temperature), and tune some settings. This can help you keep an eye on your hardware, even if it’s not doing anything particularly advanced. There is no drive cloning or data migration software bundled with the drive, on the other hand, though Western Digital does offer a version of Acronis True Image for download from its website.
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For more details, including specific performance test results, check out the WD Blue SSD review(Opens in a new window) on our sister site, Computer Shopper.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/wd-blue-ssd
