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WD Blue SN570 review: The best cheap SSD grows upYou can’t go wrong with this fast, affordable SSD
You can’t go wrong with this fast, affordable SSD
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Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh on the earlier Blues – theWD Blue SN550actually made it into ourbest SSDs for gamingrankings, and laid the groundwork for this new model with higher read/write speeds than you might expect from an affordable SSD. Still, the SN570 asserts even greater ambition, claiming maximum sequential read and write speeds of 3500MB/s and 3000MB/s respectively on the 1TB model. The 1TB SN550? Only ever promised 2400MB/s reads and 1950MB/s writes.
The WD Blue SN570 is no less of a budget-friendly SSD either. In fact, right now all three o its capacities are cheaper than their SN550 equivalents were Katharine reviewed the latter in 2020. You’re looking at just£37/$54for the 250GB model,£49/$58for 500GB and an especially enticing£93/$110for the 1TB model that I received for testing. The only disappointment here is the lack of a 2TB version, though 1TB is usually enough for most PC builds even without any supplementary hard drives.
Those top speeds also stood up in CrystalDiskMark’s standard sequential test, in which the SN570 recorded a 3555MB/s read speed and a 3059MB/s write speed. Like a 300mph car, you’re unlikely to ever get close to these speeds in the everyday traffic of Windows data transfers, but what makes the SN570 special is how well it maintains the pace under load. CrystalDiskMark also has a much tougher random 4K, 8-queue-8-thread test, in which the SN570 scored a 1830MB/s read speed and a 1889MB/s write speed – both utterly superb for a PCIe 3.0 drive. For comparison, the WD Blue SN550 managed 1414MB/s and 1434MB/s respectively, and that was already embarrassing some of the lower-end competition. Even theSamsung 970 Evo Pluscan’t keep up, having produced a 1669MB/s read speed and 1476MB/s write speed in the same test.
Overall, mind, there’s no doubt the new SN570 is the faster SSD. Besides its other benchmark victories, copying the entirety ofAssassin’s Creed Odysseyto the SN570 took 34 seconds less than than to the SN550, taking 2 minutes and 48 seconds total.
Even though that’s not on the level of the PCIe 4.0-poweredWD Black SN850, that’s…y’know, a PCIe 4.0 model. And whileIntel Alder Lakecould open up this drastically faster interface to PC owners who’ve yet to take advantage of it through an AMD Ryzen build, PCIe 4.0 drives remain pricier and thus less accessible than their 3.0 cousins – especially if you’re factoring in the cost of a new motherboard and CPU.
An SSD that’s both as swift and as cheap as the WD Blue SN570 therefore makes a whole lot of sense. And yes, this is a fast drive, not simply one that’s fastfor the price, though for the record it does make short work of similarly low-priced NVMe rivals like the Crucial P5 and Kingston KC2500. Neither of these could match the SN570’s CrystalDiskMark results when I tested them as well.
