WD Blue SN580 review: a capable budget gaming SSD

Constructing a PC on a finances means slicing prices at each flip, however the advantages of super-fast SSDs ought to by no means come on the expense of slicing capability, forcing you to consistently delete video games to create space for brand new ones. The WD Blue SN580 is the successor to the favored and reasonably priced SN570, providing 1TB of house for simply $70. Nevertheless, in contrast to the SN750, it is a PCIe 4.0 SSD with learn speeds as much as 4,150MB/sec, so that you get respectable efficiency in addition to low price per gigabyte.

We’ve put the WD Blue SN580 by means of its paces in our labs to see the way it stacks up in opposition to among the greatest SSDs for gaming, and guess what? It’s a succesful entry-level SSD that gives good worth on your cash, whereas being faster than a PCIe 3.0 drive.

Specs

Options

Because the M.2 SSD market shifts from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0 for its worth baseline, there’s inevitably an uptick when it comes to efficiency, and right here the WD Blue SN580 provides 600MB/sec to the sequential learn pace and practically 900MB/sec to the write pace of the Blue SN570. After all, you’ll want a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot to get its rated speeds, however these are current on virtually each new motherboard proper now, plus loads of older fashions too.

Except you’re on a supremely tight finances, we’d counsel staying away from the 250GB mannequin, although, as this can get swallowed up quickly by Home windows and video games, plus it typically solely prices a few bucks extra for the 500GB choice. The 500GB mannequin at $57 (£55) provides you with rather more respiration room, however does have barely slower speeds than the 1TB choice, which once more doesn’t price that rather more in some cases, with it extensively out there for round $75 (£70).

All WD Blue SN580 fashions use a WD in-house SanDisk 20-82-10082 controller, and our 1TB check pattern had a usable capability of 931GB as soon as formatted. You additionally don’t want a heatsink for this drive, as our 1TB mannequin by no means topped 70°C throughout our stress check.

Part of the rationale why the Blue SN580 can provide such a low price per gigabyte is its lack of a DRAM buffer. These buffers are used to assist ship peak write speeds, however right here WD has as a substitute arrange the SSD to function among the NAND in 1-bit SLC mode, somewhat than the slower 3-bit TLC that makes up the remainder of the drive’s storage, to assist guarantee speedier write operations. As soon as the drive will get a second of downtime, the info is then written out to TLC for long-term storage.

The difficulty right here is that, finally, that SLC portion will replenish after which the SSD has no choice however to put in writing on to TLC, which is far slower. With the WD Blue SN580, that can occur with 300-400MB recordsdata or bigger, the place you’ll see speeds reduce by as much as 75%. It’s additionally price noting that the endurance score is decrease for the 2TB mannequin at 900TBW (terabytes written) than costlier fashions, which have an endurance score of round 1,200TBW.

Sequential efficiency

The SN580’s CrystalDiskMark sequential speeds of 4,183MB/sec learn and 4,147MB/sec write, and the AS SSD benchmark’s 3,531MB/sec learn and three,846MB/sec write figures pale compared to sooner PCIe 4.0 SSDs which handle round 7,000MB/sec. Nevertheless, that’s why these drives price $15-20 extra for a 1TB mannequin.

By comparability, spending much more per gigabyte and choosing a PCIe 5.0 SSD such because the Essential T705 will see these speeds tripled, however the identical will even occur to the worth.

Random efficiency

The random 4K efficiency of the SN580 was additionally a good bit slower than the quickest PCIe 4.0 SSDs we’ve seen, with the Solidigm P44 Professional hitting 87MB/sec learn and 343MB/sec write in CrystalDiskMark’s Q1T1 random 4K check, in comparison with 73MB/sec and 227MB/sec respectively for the WD Blue SN580.

In the meantime, the WD Blue SN580’s Q32 T16 check resulted in learn and write speeds of two,539MB/sec and three,373MB/sec, which once more had been noticeably slower than the 5,900MBsec for reads and 5,092MB/sec for the Solidigm P44 Professional.

Actual world efficiency

The PCMark 10 full drive benchmark options real-world assessments corresponding to mimicking Home windows and sport boot instances, utility loading instances, and performing duties inside them.

Right here the WD Blue SN580’s rating of two,921 wasn’t too far-off from the three,754MB/sec recorded by the far pricier Essential T700, which works to point out that, regardless that the T705 sequential speeds had been 3 times as quick, in the case of coping with software program, it’s definitely not acting at triple the pace of the SN580.

Verdict

If saving each greenback counts, and also you received’t be throwing quite a lot of hundred megabytes at it regularly, the WD Blue SN580 is an efficient alternative in practically all capacities. Nevertheless, we advocate staying away from the 250GB choice, given how little house it should go away you as soon as Home windows is put in.

Whereas it’s noticeably slower in peak pace sequential assessments than the quickest PCIe 4.0 SSDs we’ve seen, in random 4K assessments and PCMark 10’s real-world drive benchmark, the SN580 can maintain its personal. Many PCIe 4.0 SSDs able to 7,000MB/sec or extra will likely be a barely higher purchase given the small additional outlay, however should you’d somewhat put the additional 30 bucks in the direction of a quieter CPU cooler or higher case, then it’s nonetheless a stable if unremarkable SSD.

For extra SSD selections, take a look at our greatest SSD for gaming information. In the event you’re in search of a drive you can plug straight into your laptop computer, then our greatest exterior SSD information with our skilled opinions can level you in the precise route.