The fact is that Western Digital is expanding and massively marketing its NVMe PCIe SSDs in the mid-range M.2 format. Ultimately, you know that the mid-range market is the one that sells the most units, and more when it offers good performance – albeit far from the high-end models – at a good price and at very low prices, as is the case with the WD Blue SN550 which in addition seems to offer less 5 year warranty
Low grade performance, low price
The biggest attraction of these SSDs is, without a doubt, its price. There are three differences, which have the potential for 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB at a price of $ 54, $ 65 and $ 99 respectively, which makes them one of the cheapest NVMe SSDs on the market. WD also features an extension of the aforementioned 5 year warranty, so they will certainly be more appealing to home users who not only use their new equipment with M.2 sockets for storage faster than SATA 3 SSDs but without scratching your pocket too much.
WD used TLC NAND's 96-memory chips and 96-memory chips with these SSDs. The three models have the M.2 2280 format with PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface and NVMe protocol that reaches speed up to 2400 MB / s in three models (previous family, SN500, only reached 1700 MB / s), while write speed depends on model: 950 MB / s for 250 GB, 1750 MB / s for 500 GB up to 1950 MB / s 1 model of TB.
Obviously, in our opinion, the most interesting model is 1 TB that about 90 euros provides us with the maximum power and speed and literacy rate of 2400/1950 MB / s.
By the way, that the attractiveness of the 5-year warranty is well established, and that the manufacturer has explained the limited capacity of these devices to the 150 TBW 250 GB model, 300WW 500 GB model and 600 TBW of 1 TB, so for general use of these devices we can easily keep the guarantee they give us.
It is expected that these new WD Blue SN550s will arrive in stores not too long, by the start of the year they should be everywhere.
