WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD – a snappy M2 2280 SSD (Western Digital storage review)

The WD Blue SN570 is a Gen 3 PCIe NVMe SSD snappy speedster at a great price. It reaches 3500MBps sequential read and does well on large files and video rendering. With 1TB at $180 and 2TB available, it is a perfect hard disk replacement.

There are heaps of SSD brands and speeds. In the end, it is about throughput, cache size (relates to large file handling), warranty and whether there is a management App or disk clone software.

Western Digital (WD) is a respected brand. The WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD is PCIe NVMe Gen 3 x4 and has a sequential read of over 3500MBps. It has a 5-year warranty, a good management app and Acronis True Image clone software. It is DRAMLESS, so it is a little slower on large files. Well, that ticks all the boxes.

Australian Review: WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD 1TB as tested

Website	Product Page AND WD Internal SSD Page
Price From Harris Tech	250GB $85 (34 cents per GB) 500GB $110 (22 cents) 1TB $185 (18.5 cents) 2TB TBA
From	Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi, Good Guys, Officeworks, Bing Lee and online at Amazon WD store and Harris Technology
Warranty	5-years limited
Company	Western Digital (WD) is an American computer hard disk drive manufacturer and data storage company headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology products, including storage devices, data centre systems and cloud storage services.
More	CyberShack Western Digital news and reviews

We use Fail (below expectations), Pass (meets expectations) and Exceed (surpasses expectations or is the class leader) against many of the items below. We occasionally give a Pass(able) rating that is not as good as it should be and a Pass ‘+’ rating to show it is good but does not quite make it to Exceed.

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Tests – WD Blue SN570 NVMe PCIe Gen 3 M2.2280 SSD 1TB

Our test device was a PC with an ASUS motherboard and PCIe Gen 3 SSD daughter card.

Using Crystal Disk Mark tests peak throughput. Sequential read/write speeds of 3616.65/2979.77 are  – excellent. More impressive is the large file handling, which means you could image render on this.

CPDT tests sustained read/write. Sequential read/write speeds were 2550/845.79MBps.

Black Magic Disk Speed Test looks at video rendering.

CyberShack’s view – WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD is a perfect upgrade or replacement

As a Gen 3 x4 PCIe, NVMe, it works with all motherboards and processors, unlike the even faster Gen 4 that only works with select AMD motherboards and processors.

It uses BiCS5 112-Layer TLC flash with a PCIe 3.0 controller to manage higher interface speeds. It does not have a DRAM cache (like most in this price bracket) and allocates 64MB of SSD. That means very large file transfer is a little slower than a much more expensive SSD with DRAM Cache.

As we said earlier, it ticks all the boxes and gets our unreserved buy recommendation. Note that CyberShack does not carry many internal SSD reviews, but in a previous life, I reviewed Samsung, Seagate, WD, PNY, Kingston, SK Hynix, Crucial and more.

This is up there with other Tier 1 SSDs. It is faster than the Samsung 970 EVO Plus, Samsung 980 (DRAMLESS) and a WD-Back SN750. But it will be slower on large file transfers than cache-equipped SSD.