PC World - USA (2020-02)

FEBRUARY 2020 PCWorld 61

WD SN550 NVMe SSD: Good

performance, very good price

An improvement on WD’s own SN500 in every way, the SN550 is also only 10 cents per

gigabyte in the 1TB capacity. BY JON L. JACOBI

W

D’s new Blue SN550 is a

nice improvement on the

older SN500 (go.pcworld.

com/s500), though it still

isn’t going to worry the competition with its

performance. However, other vendors sure

won’t be happy that it’s 10 cents per gigabyte

at the 1TB capacity.

DESIGN AND FEATURES

The WD Blue SN550 is a x4 PCIe 3.0, M.2

NVMe SSD in the 2280 form factor. That is,

22mm wide and 80mm long. The NAND is

96-layer TLC (Triple Layer Cell/3-bit) with an

unspecified percentage utilized as SLC

(Single Level Cell/1-bit) cache. More on that

later.

The 1TB SN550 we tested is $100 on

Amazon (10 cents a gigabyte; go.pcworld.

com/s1tb), while the 500GB is $70 on

Amazon (go.pcworld.com/b500), and the

250GB flavor costs $50 on Amazon (go.

pcworld.com/b250). While I didn’t find any

better deals on a 1TB drive, I did find several

cheaper 250GB and 500GB drives, so it’s the

highest capacity where you’ll get the best

bang for the buck.

The SN550 carries a five-year warranty

and is rated for 600 TBW for every 1TB of

capacity. That means you can write 600

terabytes to the 1TB drive before you’ll

start losing capacity, or things will

otherwise go wonky. Note that TBW

ratings are estimates, and likely

conservative ones at that, formulated with

legal and other concerns in mind.

IMAGE: WD