Saturday 14 November 2020

Western Digital WD Blue SN550 1TB M.2 NVEME SSD

 Well, this one is actually a just typing review, since sometimes SSD reviews and hard drive reviews have not been as well-received in the past, but this was an overdue one due to the use of the Xiaomai 6 Pro E5100. But as much as it was a decent laptop, it was still not being used much due to the issue of me having to get files transferred and a 1TB HDD is not the best, way so after searching and realising, I went for the SN550. Around the £100.73 mark in cost. So here we go and see if it is worth the upgrade. 



The Packaging

Like any of the WD, the packaging is simple and easy to understand, with the colour scheme matching either the speed or the energy saving of what you wish to go for. This case the blue and white is WD's True design here and has been for most of the years, the simplicity of the front and the nice amount of small detail on the back are enough to really get them to advertise if this is worth the hassle or not But the S/N is shown from the back of the box (directly to the drive) which does make it easier in some ways for this t know its not a knockoff. 

The Front of the box 



The right sie of the box



The left side of the box 



The back of the box 

as I opened it up with the iseasmo tool, the packaging is secure and easy to protect the drive from damage like water and even kicking about, well even though its light than it already is. The chip is blue and the controller is a SanDisk one of all things, but not surprising since WD own Sandisk. 

The back of the inside



The front has the manual on it above 



A look underneath the chip



The front of the chip 



A closer look at the SanDisk controller

Then it was time to fit it in and see if it will work. 

The fitting: 


Now for this, it was actually near the imperative mark to make sure it was in the correct way, plus I had to clone over the files from my 1TB Firecuda I bought 3 years ago due to the requirements of the laptop used for editing back then, the Dell Latitude E6230. And well it was low and behold, easy to fit inside the 6 Pro since the M.2 Slot is hidden but also secure as well. 

The WD drive and the Firecuda 


The laptop before fitting 



The SN550 in the heatsink




The Old WD Green and the SN550 in the heatsink 





Both the new drives fitted. 


Time to test: 

Test #1: Does it boot up: 

Yes is the answer since after turning the laptop on, the bios saw it straight away, and t was on AHCI as well, which means that is one major relief and Maibenben do mention that the 6 pro does support NVME. 

The bios show the drive 

Which then it was time to boot up a portable version of windows for the cloning and drive tests. Thus was, of course, Hirens Boot CD PE  and that actually did see both drives as well, in this case, it meant that I could clone and also do some benchmarks. 

Test #2: CrystalDiskMark. 

 
This is always the one that people use, and well no exception here, so below are the results. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 x64 (C) 2007-2019 hiyohiyo
                                  Crystal Dew World: https://crystalmark.info/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

[Read]
Sequential 1MiB (Q=  8, T= 1):  1764.129 MB/s [   1682.4 IOPS] <  4750.27 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q=  1, T= 1):   895.404 MB/s [    853.9 IOPS] <  1166.17 us>
    Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16):  1044.895 MB/s [ 255101.3 IOPS] <  1703.41 us>
    Random 4KiB (Q=  1, T= 1):    36.321 MB/s [   8867.4 IOPS] <   112.17 us>

[Write]
Sequential 1MiB (Q=  8, T= 1):  1592.534 MB/s [   1518.8 IOPS] <  5243.20 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q=  1, T= 1):   937.481 MB/s [    894.1 IOPS] <  1113.14 us>
    Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16):   878.871 MB/s [ 214568.1 IOPS] <  2370.48 us>
    Random 4KiB (Q=  1, T= 1):   153.703 MB/s [  37525.1 IOPS] <    26.42 us>

Profile: Default
   Test: 2 GiB (x4) [Interval: 5 sec] <DefaultAffinity=DISABLED>
   Date: 2020/11/11 21:54:21
     OS: Windows 10 Enterprise [10.0 Build 14393] (x64)



So that shows it can handle speeds quite nicely and well means it can improve the day to day times of things by a fair bit and that it also shows its a massive improvement compared to  what a SATA SSD can be, Now wit that out of the way it was time to clone and then see how long it takes for the 800GB or less of Data from one SSHD to go on this SSD. 



Test #3: Cloning Drives


This is where the main thing to plan out was, so it is tem to do a clone from the HDD to the SSD. Well it went really well and worked fine, Okay, it did take about 4 hours to copy over about 750GB of files (the total used on the drive, and the 2 partitions on there). Now lazesoft did it and the drive (not the SSD the SSHD) that got very warm. With the boot partitions and no errors unlike another clone which is to get the issue of if it feels slow or not., But when it booted up, no issues and the speed was impressive. Not like instant but still faster than the 240GB SATA 3 SSD of WD Green. 



The SSD  being cloned 

This then was leading to some interesting observations on the usage. 

Test #3: Daily Usage

Now this is where the good things happen, the bootup times felt snappier and also apps did load up quicker and also even using blogger was much less  delayed than other devices i used for typing up, which i would not expect an ssd to affect that much performance when typing. But that and files from a usb drive did copy around 80mb/s which was the installation files for Fornite actually.. 




Test #4: Userbenchmark

Now lets be intrigued on how the benchmark for the laptop is not complete for some reason, but it actually performed worse than other laptops using this drive. Since of the 839mbs read and lower write speeds, so userbenchmark was reporting it to be inaccurate. 



Conclusion: 

All in all this drive has some serious potential, maybe it is a bit of a waste on the Xiaomai 6 Pro but i've now got the fasted PC i've ever owned in my life so far, Sure its not a PCIE Gen 4 but that laptop does not support it anyway so it would be null and wasted to get that drive.


omracer's Rating: 8/10


The Good Points: 

  • 1TB or storage
  • Actually a improvement on speeds 
  • Fits the maibenben and is compatible
  • Pretty good value 
  • Easy to install and use aka no drivers
  • Same model to the one used in the Xbox Series S 

The Bad Points: 

  • Not all laptops support NVME 
  • Benchmark results are very low for the drive compared to other laptops and PCs using it 


And there more reviews are, we will see each other soon enough with maybe one more review this year. 

omracer