The Western Digital Blue (1TB) SSD Review: WD Returns to SSDs
by Billy Tallis on October 11, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- SSDs
- Storage
- Western Digital
- SanDisk
Final Words
When it was first announced at the beginning of this year, the SanDisk X400 was a good value. It raised the bar for planar TLC performance and carried a reasonable mid-range price. The X400 offered OEMs a TCG Opal-compliant self encrypting drive option and was the first single-sided 1TB M.2 SSD.
The WD Blue follows in the footsteps of the SanDisk X400 and doesn't break any new ground. The hardware is essentially identical, but the firmware has been re-tuned. The WD Blue trades some capacity for an increased write endurance rating that is above average for a mainstream SATA SSD. The extra overprovisioning allows for improved sustained random write performance, one of the few benchmarks where the X400 was not the fastest planar TLC drive. Unfortunately, the WD Blue is slower than the X400 on most other tests and is not able to secure a claim to being the fastest budget SSD, though it does offer decent well-rounded performance with no major shortcomings. In spite of the increased endurance rating, the WD Blue only comes with a three year warranty compared to the five year warranty offered on the X400.
The WD Blue does manage to push the limits of planar TLC power efficiency, but only incrementally. In comparison to the radical improvement offered by Micron's 3D TLC in the Crucial MX300, the WD Blue's progress is insignificant.
| SATA SSD Price Comparison | |||||
| Capacity | 240-256GB | 480-512GB | 960-1024GB | ||
| WD Blue (MSRP) | $79.99 | $139.99 | $299.99 | ||
| SanDisk X400 | $79.99 | $135.19 | $248.99 | ||
| Crucial MX300 | $69.98 | $119.99 | $247.40 | ||
| OCZ Trion 150 | $65.74 | $112.99 | $226.00 | ||
| OCZ VX500 | $96.99 | $154.99 | $334.99 | ||
| Samsung 850 EVO | $99.99 | $157.30 | $306.07 | ||
The most important difference between the WD Blue and the SanDisk X400 is the fact that the WD Blue is launching into a very different market. Planar TLC NAND is no longer the only option for budget SSDs as Micron's 3D TLC is now shipping in volume and is substantially cheaper than Samsung's 3D TLC in the 850 EVO. The Crucial MX300 based on Micron's 3D TLC is faster and substantially more power efficient than planar TLC SSDs including both the SanDisk X400 and the WD Blue.
However the market doesn't seem to have fully adjusted to this situation. The SanDisk X400 is currently more expensive than the Crucial MX300 while only offering a longer warranty period to justify the premium. More entry-level TLC drives like the OCZ Trion 150 are barely cheaper than the MX300. To compete against the Crucial MX300 and other 3D TLC drives that are coming to market, the WD Blue will have to be priced far below its starting MSRP, which seems to have been set in consideration of only the planar TLC competition. Micron's 3D TLC is driving down prices and if Western Digital can't make the WD Blue even cheaper, it will not be able to secure a place in the crowded SSD market.
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Decoherent - Friday, October 14, 2016 - link
There aren't a lot of reasons to use vendor-specific software (which often sucks) when you can use Macrium Reflect's free version, which is much more powerful. It's helped me sort out some other weird problems, too, such as fixing wrong UEFI entries that I couldn't figure out.jwcalla - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
I don't think I would trust WD anything when it comes to storage.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
Why not? This is just a SanDisk drive with a few minor firmware tweaks. Besides that, WD was the industry leader before SSDs were a thing. Sure picking between Seagate, Quantum, Maxtor (omg that 4.3GB Bigfoot drive...how I missed your 3 months of dog slow performance before you started making the click o' death), and WD (I guess Toshiba and Hitachi too) was like picking between which rusty razor you'd prefer to slit your wrist with, but at least with WD drives you clould get a good gusher going before the blade broke.LordConrad - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
I loved the Quantum Bigfoot, it was as great way to increase capacity for storage drives without having to wait for aerial density to increase.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
Oh the idea was sound. Going back to a 5.25 inch chassis to increase capacity seemed like a decent idea even though we'd long ago shifted to 3.5 inch drives. The problem with the Bigfoot was reliability. I had one I personally owned die on me and quite a few we sold to customers (12GB models) came back dead within less than 6 months. I remember all the hassles of getting RMAs done for those things. On the other hand, Quantum's 3.5 inch drives seemed fairly reliable. I wonder if there was a problem with heat expansion doing bad things to the read/write heads due to the larger platter size. It wasn't a problem with older 5.25 inch hard drives because they were usually full height and ran at a lower RPM than the Bigfoots.LordConrad - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
I don't even remember what speed they ran at. Was it the full 5400rpm, or something slower like 5200 or 4900?BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link
I don't remember all the specs and had to look them up. The originals and the CY series ran at 3600 RPM and the TX, and TS series brought it up to 4000. If I recall correctly, when the Bigfoot was still in retail channels, a lot of 3.5 inch drives were ticking along at 3600 to 4200 RPM. 5400 RPM drives came along later and I don't know if Bigfoots were even in production when they were being sold as high performance storage solutions (well, non-SCSI drives anyhow...spindle speeds for SCSI devices were quite a bit higher).This is half from memory and the rest was from a couple of quick web searches so take all that with a grain of salt or two. I could be a bit off as it's been a long time.
mikato - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
"I don't think I would trust anything when it comes to storage."That's better. Have backups that work.
But anyway, why all the dumping on WD? I don't think it is warranted.
barleyguy - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
There have been many periods in the past where WD had very high failure rates. Because of that, many of us that have been around awhile have been bit in the butt by WD and don't trust them anymore. In the late 90s and early 2000s for instance, WD's failure rate was so high they had a wait queue and callback system set up for RMAs.That said, I think for last few years WD has been very good, so maybe it is unwarranted in the short term.
In particular I really like the WD Blue. They aren't fast, but they seem to be a very reliable drive, and throwing them in a RAID array with an SSD boot disk results in a pretty solid system.
Gigaplex - Tuesday, October 11, 2016 - link
Their main competitor, Seagate, has also had very high failure rates. Mikato was correct, don't trust any of them. There's no need to dump on WD more than the others.