Expert rating
Benefits
- Fantastically affordable
- Super-fast real-world transfers
- Single sided for laptop upgrades
The inconvenients
- Slows down to less than 300 Mbps when writing secondary cache
- Slightly low endurance rating
Our opinion
We nearly gave this incredibly affordable, yet blazing fast NVMe SSD five stars. It is THE are trading in the market right now, and there is no other reader who comes close.
Wow, it took a while, but thanks to WD, NVMe SSDs have finally become mainstream. Case in point: the company’s Blue SN580, which offers 1TB of capacity for a ridiculously affordable $50/£48. It is also extremely fast in real-world tasks. Fast? Super cheap? We assume that other SSD vendors will not be satisfied.
Design, specifications and price
Physically, the WD SN580 is your standard single-sided 2280 SSD (22mm wide, 80mm long). It is suitable for laptop upgrades, it is PCIe 4.0 x4 and uses a WD/Sandisk-branded controller and a Sandisk-labeled 112-layer NAND TLC (Triple-Level Cell/3-bit).
Again, this is by far the cheapest NVMe SSD we’ve seen, available in capacities of $27.99/£32.99 (250GB), $31.99/£34.99 (500GB ), $49.99/£48.99 (1TB) and $109.99/£96.99 (2TB) (we tested the 1TB drive). These sticker prices are approaching half competition costs in 1TB and 2TB versions.
Can you say “game changer” five times faster? Or maybe, “Here’s the margins” if you’re a competing SSD vendor.
It is currently only available at official WD US and WD UK stores as well as Amazon US. Check out our table of the best SSDs for more options.
The sticker pricing approach half competition costs in 1TB and 2TB versions.
Of course, something has to give with such low prices, but the compromise is not so bad. The SN580 has a warranty of five years or 450 TB (terabytes that can be written) per 1 TB of capacity. 600TBW is the bargain standard, but given this drive’s unprecedented value for money, you shouldn’t worry about that. 450TB endurance rating means you can write (i.e. copy or save) an average of 246GB per day to the reader for five years.
WD is playing something called nCache 4.0, which since it’s a host memory buffer design, probably has to do with interfacing your device’s memory (the host bus memory) that the drive uses for primary caching. As our recent test of the Sabrent Rocket Q4 revealed a substantial increase in HMB performance over previous generations, I guess nCache is at least somewhat related.
Despite the price, WD bundles its SSD Dashboard for disk monitoring as well as Acronis True Image for backup. It’s quite the package.
Performance
The SN580 is the second NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD we’ve tested that uses host bus memory. Like the recently reviewed Sabrent Rocket Q4, the SN580 produced stellar benchmark results and real world results. In fact, the SN580 beat the Sabrent in several of our tests.
Not quite believing our eyes, we took a number of extra passes in this test
Indeed, the SN580’s times to transfer our small data set of 48GB files and folders are oddly fast. It beat the former number one PCIe 5.0 Crucial T700 by 23 seconds. Holy smoke!
Not quite believing our eyes, we made a number of extra passes in this test, and as far as we could tell, there was no monkeying problem. Apparently SanDisk (WD’s SSD guru) conjured up some form of advanced transfer magic.
The industry scuttlebut wants the latest Micron NAND to be simply stellar when writing in SLC mode. This NAND may be labeled Sandisk/China, but I guess it is, at the very least, a similar design that takes advantage of the same breakthrough.
If you’re not familiar, SLC means single-bit/single-level/or write cell where all voltage is one, and no voltage is zero. MLC, TLC, and QLC use multiple voltage levels to represent larger numbers, but error checking to ensure the correct level is actually written slows things down a bit. Running in SLC mode means the drive can go much faster.
Below you can see the SN580’s CrystalDiskMark 8 numbers. The first three drives are PCIe 4.0, with the Crucial T700 being PCIe 5.0. The SN850X and T700 have DRAM cache, while as noted the SN580 and Rocket Q4 use host bus memory. As you can see, when it comes to NVMe and synthetic benchmarks, PCIe 5.0 rules.
Our test sample of the SN580, having only 1TB of capacity, stalled while writing 450GB, running in the slowest times we’ve seen on our new test bench. You’re unlikely to write 450GB of contiguous data very often, but the slowdown is indicative of the performance you’ll get when the drive is nearly filled to capacity. (For this reason, it’s a good idea to buy an SSD with more capacity than you think you need.)
As you’ll see below, the seconds only piled up towards the end when the write slowed to 500 Mbps. However, that’s about 200 Mbps faster than what we’ve already seen TLC writing natively. Something has really improved in NAND technology.
To be fair, the other 1TB SSD we recently wrote our 450GB on, the Adata Legend 960, was only two seconds faster. In its 2TB incarnation, the SN580 would run in a much more competitive time.
Where the SN580 impressed the most was obviously in our 48GB transfers, regularly exceeding 3GB/s, a speed once achieved only by PCIe 5.0 SSDs.
Yes, our last two HBM SSDs were as dominant on PCIe 4.0 as PCIe 5.0 SSDs are above 5th Gen. Of course, we haven’t tested any HBM PCIe 5.0 drives yet, so this isn’t a complete picture. It will probably be a while before PCIe 5.0 drives are available, but keep an eye out.
the SN580 is the SDD you want at this price
By Grapthar’s hammer, what an economy!
If you get the reference, nice to know you. Otherwise, it’s just a corny way of saying that the SN580 is a wonderfully capable NVMe SSD that costs a lot less than the competition. As long as this situation holds, the SN580 is the SDD you want at this price.
How we test SSDs
Internal drive tests are currently using Windows 11, 64-bit running on an X790 (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 processor combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (64GB total memory). 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 4 are built into the rear panel and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. The 48 GB transfer tests use an ImDisk RAM disk occupying 58 GB of the 64 GB of total memory. The 450 GB file is transferred from a 2 TB Samsung 990 Pro which is also running the operating system.
Each test is performed on a newly formatted drive and TRIM so that the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance decreases due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors.
Caution: The performance figures shown apply only to the drive shipped to us and the capacity tested. SSD performance can and will vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips for shotgun reads/writes and the amount of NAND available for secondary caching. Vendors also occasionally swap components. If you ever notice a significant discrepancy between the performance you’re experiencing and what we’re reporting, please let us know.
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