WD Blue SSD Review (1TB) – WD Steps Into The Ring

TSSDR TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL

SSD testing at TSSDR differs slightly, depending on whether we are looking at consumer or enterprise SSDs. For consumer SSDs, our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide. To see the best performance possible, the CPU C states have been disabled, C1E support has been disabled, Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST) has been disabled. Benchmarks for consumer testing are also benchmarks with a fresh drive so, not only can we verify that manufacturer specifications are in line but also, so the consumer can replicate our tests to confirm that they have an SSD that is top-notch. We even provide links to most of the benchmarks used in the report.

Sean Consumer Test Bench Core V51

SYSTEM COMPONENTS

This Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchase; our appreciation goes to those who jumped in specifically to help the cause. Key contributors to this build are our friends at ASRock for the motherboard and CPU and be quiet! for the PSU and cooling fans. Also, a big thank you to Thermaltake for the case and Kingston for the RAM. We have detailed all components in the table below and they are all linked should you wish to make a duplicate of our system as so many seem to do, or check out the price of any single component. As always, we appreciate your support in any purchase through our links!

PC CHASSIS: Thermaltake Core V51
MOTHERBOARD: ASRock Z97 Extreme6
CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K
CPU COOLER: Corsair H75
POWER SUPPLY: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 10 850W
SYSTEM COOLING: be quiet! Silent Wings 2
MEMORY: Kingston HyperX Beast 2400Mhz
STORAGE: Samsung 850 Pro
IRST DRIVER: 13.1.0.1058

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

The software in use for today’s analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of Crystal Disk Info, TRIMcheck, ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal Disk Mark, AS SSD, Anvil’s Storage Utilities, PCMark Vantage, and PCMark 8. We prefer to test with easily accessible software that the consumer can obtain, and in many cases, we even provide links. Our selection of software allows each to build on the last and to provide validation to results already obtained.

CRYSTAL DISK INFO VER. 6.8.2

Crystal Disk Info is a great tool for displaying the characteristics and health of storage devices. It displays everything from temperatures, to the number of hours the device has been powered, and even to the extent of informing you of the firmware of the device.

wd-blue-ssd-1tb-cdi

Crystal Disk Info confirms that the WD Blue SSD supports SMART, TRIM, DevSleep, and NCQ. We can see the readout for the working temperature sensor. Total host reads and writes attributes are available for the end user to see, however, the many others are vendor specific and can only be monitored in the SSD Dashboard.

TRIMCHECK

We’ve covered TRIMcheck in the past. It is a great tool that easily lets us see if TRIM is actually functioning on a SSD volume in your system.

1TB Crucial MX300 RAID 0 trim

As can be seen in the screenshot above, TRIM is indeed working.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.05

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

wd-blue-ssd-1tb-atto

During our first go at benchmarking, ATTO reveals very solid performance. Across all file sizes read performance is better than write. The WD Blue SSD was able to achieve 560MB/s read and 530MB/s write in this test.

3 comments

  1. blank

    Been so quiet thought you’d all gone on holiday together.
    WD will need to learn the SSD pricing game really quick.

    Wonderful to see someone else reaching 10K-4K iops.
    thro in other reviews it’s all over the place-Crystal 10K+
    AS-SSD 7K7 and Anvil 7K9………………………….
    Be interesting to see how smaller drives go…………….
    EDIT
    as to your surprise how well this drive performed fol planer TLC.
    Thro Sammy were first out the door-we all know the problems
    the 840 series had.And Crucial’s BX200 sits just above the lemons.
    Sandisk produced a good midrange drive with the Ultra2 quite a while ago.

  2. blank

    c’mon, 2d tlc needs to die quick. 3d tlc can’t come soon enough for budget drives.

  3. blank

    I came across this file transfer tool called Binfer. I have used Binfer to transfer large files with Binfer several times and recommend it highly. It does require the senders computer to stay online.

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