I can’t remember when was the last time I actually purchased a mechanical hard drive for my PC, considering the fact that solid state drives are getting more affordable and I get way better performance even if I’m actually paying more for the same storage amount.

Speaking of affordability and performance, this is where the WD Blue SN550 comes into the picture, the successor to the old SN500 now offers up to 1TB of storage, NVMe speeds yet maintaining an accessible price tag.

WD’s packaging for its solid state drive is minimalist and easily recognizable, and what you get inside is just the drive and a warranty guide paperwork, no extra screw or heatsink, which is expected for a budget-friendly SSD.

One thing to love about the WD Blue SN550 is its single sided chip design, that’s impressive especially considering our unit is the 1TB model, as it allows better compatibility for installing on thinner laptops, there isn’t any stickers on the back of the drive too so you can admire that blue PCB properly if you want to.

Using four lanes of PCIe Gen 3 and 3D NAND, the WD Blue SN550 offers read and write speeds of up to 2400MB/s and 1950MB/s respectively, which is more than sufficient for loading a game and scrubbing 4K video files on Adobe Premiere Pro, the latter has been our main usage of the drive as it is installed on our videographer’s editing rig.

Test System Specifications

• CPU: Intel Core i5-9400F
• Cooler: Thermaltake TH240 ARGB
• Motherboard: SuperO C7Z370-CG-IW
• RAM: Patriot Viper RGB Gaming 8GBx2 3000MHz
• SSD: Apacer AS340 240GB (Operating System)/WD Blue SN550 1TB
• GPU: ZOTAC GAMING NVIDIA GeForce GTX1660 6GB GDDR5
• Chassis: Silverstone SG13P
• Power Supply: Corsair SF600 600W

WD SSD Dashboard Software

One of the best things about owning a WD SSD is its user friendly software, where it shows you the health and information of your drive at one glance, you will also be able to monitor its real time performance, clone and securely erase the drive with this tool.

WD Blue SN550 Benchmarks

The WD Blue SN550 1TB exceeded its promised speeds when tested with CrystalDiskMark, it performed particularly well when performing random 4K writes with a single thread, which is really impressive for a 3D TLC NAND drive with SRAM cache.

Even without using its cache, the WD Blue SN550 didn’t lose too much from its intended performance when running AS SSD Benchmark.

Verdict

Over one month of our videographer’s heavy usage as a video editing drive, the WD Blue SN550 has so far performed reliably and I detect no performance degradation, while we could have easily written over 5TB over the period, this drive should last the average user for quite a while if mainly used for storing games and as an operating system drive with a 600TBW endurance rating.

At RM539, the WD Blue SN550 1TB is a good budget friendly option if all you want is a fast and reliable large NVMe drive for your system, however if you are willing to fork out an extra RM100, you can get a much faster drive with slightly better endurance for the same storage capacity.

The Good

• Consistent data transfer speed
• Backed by 5-years WD warranty
• Good monitoring software

The Not so Good

• Uncompetitve price point
• Not the best in class endurance