WD Blue SN550 PCIe NVMe SSD has great value and performance

The WD Blue SN550 at 22 cents per gigabyte, is all that most value-conscious PC/laptop owners could want.

The WD Blue SN550 is aimed at the replacement market offering more than four times the speed of a SATA 6 SSD/HDD and yet a price point about 30% less than the top speed SSDs like the WD Black.

And the question is, do you need the speed of the WD Black anyway? The answer is that unless you are doing a disk-intensive task like video/still rendering of large files, then you are not going to use the WD Blue SN550 top-end speed anyway.

WD Blue SN550 NVMe PCIe SSD (1TB tested)

Website here

Warranty: 5 years or 600 TBW (1TB)

Prices from mwave

250GB <$100 approx. 40 cents per GB
500GB <$110 22 cents
1TB <$240 23 cents

What is it?

It is a PCIe 3.0 x 4 lane NVMe 1.4, M.2, 2280 format SSD for PCs and laptops. Speed tops out around 2400/2000Mbps sequential read/write and has quite respectable large file random read/write speeds.

It is TLC (Triple Layer Cell/3-bit) with some of that allocated to SLC (single-level cell/1-bit) cache. WD does not disclose cache size but our tests show it fills at about 15GB or 1.5% of the drive. That is pretty good.

It also implements the latest NVMe 1.4 protocol that accounts for part of the drive’s performance.

It sits in the value end under the WD Black SN750 that will do 3400/3000 sequential read/write that are currently

250 $117 approx 46 cents per GB
500 $165 33 cents
1TB $400 39 cents
2TB $710 35 cents

Setup (Windows 10 tested)

The disk requires activation from Windows Admin Tools, Storage manager. Once an active partition is there, you can format with many disk storage formats.

You can read our guide to a clean install or clone of your current storage to SSD here.