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

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In contrast, the utility's 4K (or "random read/write") tests simulate typical processes involved in program/game launching... Now, a drive can operate just fine without a DRAM chip installed. Instead, the "map" is stored either on the NAND flash chips themselves, or can be stored temporarily in the RAM of the system you're booting into. From the SSD maker's point of view, leaving off the DRAM saves on production cost, thereby making the drive cheaper to manufacture, and cheaper for consumers in the end. However, this can have a marked effect on drives that are used to store operating systems, programs, or games, all of which use shallow-depth 4K writes and reads. A WD Blue SATA Internal SSD can last up to 1.75M hours MTTF 2 (mean time to failure), with up to 600 TBW 3 (terabytes written), and has built in technology to correct errors in real time. Here the drive is strong in 4K random write speeds, and competitive in random read. AS-SSD Copy Tests In these traces, the WD Blue SN550 regularly scores in the top tiers of its competitors when launching games like Overwatch or COD, though it lagged slightly behind more gaming-oriented drives like the Seagate FireCuda 510 and TeamGroup T-Force Cardea II in Battlefield 5. Launching Creative Applications

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Unlike those tests, which copy a file from another drive onto the testing drive and record the raw writing throughput to the drive (or reading capacity off of it to another drive), PCMark 10 is expressing the average bandwidth speed of a transfer when the file is on the same drive. If you're regularly moving files around on your drive from one folder to another, this test is a handy relative throughput measure. Last up is a series of file and folder transfers done in the SSD benchmarking utility AS-SSD. This trio of tests involves copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another… Here the drives are put through a very important test for creative types. As anyone who regularly works in programs like Adobe Premiere or Photoshop can tell you, oftentimes the most excruciating part of the whole experience is the time it takes for the program to launch. There are a lot of elements that creative applications need to load. Based on read speed, unless otherwise specified. As used for transfer rate, megabyte per second (MB/s) = one million bytes per second. Performance will vary depending on your hardware and software components and configurations.Here the drive finally starts to falter against some other drives we tested, but it actually exceeds (by a smidge) its WD-rated speeds in sequential reads and writes. 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. 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

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Because the data is moved around frequently, some SSDs use a smidge of DRAM—which is much faster to access and read than NAND flash—to "map out" the data, and provide a reference point for the drive so it knows where everything is.

Okay, off of PCMark 10 and onto a more traditional measure. The Crystal DiskMark 6.0 sequential tests simulate best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. Let's get into the drag races. The Western Digital Dashboard helps users maintain peak performance of the Western Digital SSD in Windows operating systems with a user-friendly graphical interface for the user. The Western Digital Dashboard includes tools for analysis of the disk (including the disk model, capacity, firmware version, and SMART attributes) and firmware updates.

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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. First, there's the overall PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark. This score represents how well drives do throughout the entire PCMark 10 run, and are the sanctioned scores presented by UL's software at the end of each run. This score includes a weighted average of every simulated activity that the PCMark 10 storage test runs, from copying files to launching games, booting an OS to running creative applications. It's a general indicator of how consistently a drive can perform through 23 different usage scenarios.While the sequential results of the WD Blue SN550 may not look tip-top on the surface, it seems WD was more concerned with real-world performance in the development of this drive, rather than just peak scores in spec sheets. One of the main upgrades from the older SN500 model that we tested last year is the increase in PCI Express lane allocation, which directly affects peak throughput. The WD Blue has gone from two lanes (PCI Express x2) in the previous model, a decidedly budget move, to four (PCI Express x4) in the SN550. That helps boost the top sequential read and write speeds from the SN500's 1,700MBps and 1,450MBps, respectively, to the SN550's numbers cited above. 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. TBW (terabytes written) values calculated using JEDEC client workload (JESD219) and vary by product capacity. Though it's a bit difficult to put them up against one another 1:1 (the nature of the copied data is different in each case), the scores in the AS-SSD copy tests reiterate much of the same story we saw in the PCMark 10 run: the WD Blue holds its own. When It's Good to Be Kinda Blue

1TB WD Blue 3D NAND Internal PC SSD - SATA Western Digital 1TB WD Blue 3D NAND Internal PC SSD - SATA

The ultra-compact M.2 2280 WD Blue SATA SSD Drive goes through extensive compatibility and reliability testing to ensure it meets the high standards of the WD brand. 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 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.

As used for storage capacity, one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment.