Western Digital has this week greatly enhanced the performance of its Blue line of solid state drives by introducing the WD Blue SN500 NVMe SSD, which boasts three-times the performance(Opens in a new window) of the existing WD Blue 3D NAND SATA drives.

The WD Blue 3D SSDs(Opens in a new window) use the M.2 2280 form factor, but rely on a SATA interface meaning their performance is limited to 560MB/s read and 530MB/s write speeds. The Blue SN500(Opens in a new window) changes that by shifting to an NVMe interface, a new controller, new firmware, and Western Digital’s own 3D NAND memory. It also retains the M.2 2280 form factor, but can take full advantage of the PCIe interface.

The end result is two new SSDs offering 250GB and 500GB capacities. Both drives can achieve 1,700MB/s sequential reads, where as the 250GB model manages 1,300MB/s sequential writes, while the 500GB model pushes that up to 1,450MB/s. Both fall well short of Western Digital’s Black SN750 line, but then you’ll pay a big premium for those SSDs.

Western Digital offers a downloadable SSD dashboard which can be run to monitor the health of these drives, including available capacity, current operating temperatures, and the SMART attributes. It’s also possible to update the firmware through the dashboard and securely erase the drive if necessary.

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In terms of price, the 250GB model(Opens in a new window) is expected to sell for $54.99 while the 500GB model(Opens in a new window) is $77.99. Retailers will surely discount those prices further, but they are already quite affordable. Both have a five year limited warranty and 1.75 million hour Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) rating. The endurance of the 250GB model is rated at 150 Terabytes Written (TBW), where as the 500GB model is double that at 300TBW.