WD Blue SSD 1TB Review

The WD SSD has finally making a debut in the SSD market, a year after the acquisition of manufacturer SanDisk back in October 2015. WD offers 2 series for its WD SSD as of now, the WD Blue and WD Green in the form of 2.5″ SATA drives and M.2 drives.

Special thanks to WD, we managed to get our hands on the WD Blue SSD with 1TB capacity for today’s review. Appearance wise, it look not much different to most of the 2.5″ SSD we’ve seen in the past, but let’s just see what kind of performance or perhaps features that WD has to offer after making a come back in the SSD market!

Specifications

Unboxing

The WD Blue SSD ships in an clean and simple packaging with its usual color scheme that differentiates the drive variant by color. The packaging doesn’t contain much information about the specifications of the drive though, and the only technical related information you can pickup from the packaging is the capacity of the drive and the 3-year limited warranty by WD and a 1-year complimentary data recovery service from Kroll Ontrack.

There are no additional accessories included in the box, so the only thing you’ll get is the WD SSD and the anti-static bag. The WD Blue SSD as we can see here, comes in a plastic enclosure with a label that states the model and capacity of the drive.

At the back of the SSD, you’ll find another label that states the model name of the drive, serial number, world wide name and the manufacture date of the drive. In case if you’re interested to take the drive apart, the screws are hidden beneath the label – we don’t recommend doing so as removing the label will result in the void of the 3-year limited warranty from WD.

Software: WD SSD Dashboard

The WD SSD we have here today is the result of the acquisition of flash manufacturer SanDisk by WD earlier this year. If you’ve used a SanDisk SSD before, don’t be surprised when you find that Deja Vu experience with the user interface of the WD SSD Dashboard.

After going through the features available, we’d say that the WD SSD Dashboard is a pretty neat tool to have. Updating firmware, SSD optimization, secure erase, performance and status monitor are some of the features available and it keeps the maintenance and optimization work easy as breeze.

Software: Acronis True Image WD Edition

Of all the SSD available out there, we’ve noticed that some SSD doesn’t actually comes with a migration tool, users will have to go through the trouble of finding a reliable data migration tool, or just simply start from scratch with a fresh installation of the Operating System.

WD are among those who cares about making the life easier for the end-users and they have included a WD Edition of the renown Acronis True Image, a software product produced by Acronis that provides data protection including, backup, archive, access and recovery for Microsoft, OSX, iOS and Android operating systems.

Synthetic Benchmarks

AS SSD Benchmark

Widely used SSD benchmarking utility that uses incompressible data to simulate the worst possible scenario for an SSD and thus giving a much lower sequential read and write speed result than what has been stated by the manufacturer as result of the heavy workload.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The most frequently used benchmarking utility by many manufacturers for performance specification. As ATTO Disk Benchmark uses compressible data rather than compressible data, it results in higher benchmark scores. We’ve run the benchmark with transfer size ranged from 0.5KB to 8192KB and a total length of the test to be 256MB.

CrystalDiskMark

Developed by a Japanese coder that goes by the nickname Hiyohiyo, CrystalDiskMark is one of the most frequent used SSD Benchmark utility to measure SSD’s read and write performance.

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

By far the most complete SSD Benchmark utility available. The Anvil’s Storage Utilities not only comes with the standard SSD Benchmark function, it also includes other functions such as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests and option to configure the compressibility of the test data.

Real World Performance

We’ve run several tests using several SSD with at least 40% capacity occupied with various commonly played games to simulate some of the real world scenarios.

Verdict

Even though the WD Blue SSD doesn’t goes up to the fancy 550 MB/s read and write in numbers with the synthetic benchmark conducted, the actual real world performance difference isn’t that significant at most of the time if no super heavy read/write intensive task is involved.

It might not be the best perform SSD around, but at the price of RM1269, the cost per GB, standard 3-year limited warranty from WD and the 1-year complementary data recovery service from Kroll Ontrack are the things that differentiate it from other brands, which makes it an SSD that is really worth recommending.

Pros