REVIEW: Western Digital WD BLUE SSD

After a acquisition of SanDisk in October of last year, the Western Digital (WD) announces the arrival of the first solid state drives ou SSDs of brand. with the name of WD Blue SSD e WD Green SSD, the models have capacities that vary between 120 GB and 1 TB (1024 GB) and were designed to Desktops e laptops with support for connections SATA.

According to the company, these launches mean “the beginning of a new era for WD”, a company already known in the market for the manufacture of hard disks (the old hard drives ou HDDs) as the WD10EZEX Blue, portable models from the line Passport and of units NAS (Network Attached Storages, also known as “private clouds”) such as WD My Cloud.

At the beginning of the year, the WD sent to showmetech one unit 1TB WD Blue SSD, and our team tested the equipment under all conditions of use. The result you can see below:

WD Blue SSD Summary:

Strengths

• Solid performance;
• Large storage capacity;
• 3-year warranty and excellent durability;
• Competitive price;

Negative points

• Speed ​​rates are not the fastest;

Understanding what an SSD is

In recent years the evolution of notebooks has largely been due to the change in the storage system. In addition to development Cloud Services (Cloud Services) Another element was fundamental in this transformation: the SSD. English acronym equivalent to Solid-State Drive ou solid state drive, the term refers to a type of device without moving parts and, for that reason, more resistant than the hard drives ou hard drives traditional. It also achieves much faster write and read speeds and is manufactured in ever-smaller sizes. If you were curious, learn more about these solid state drives in the post “what is SSD".

Design

The construction of the Wd blue carries the same metal box and plastic lid as the SanDisk been using for years. Inside our 1TB sample, we find the same single-sided PCB as on the X400 and the thermal pad that covers almost all the components. NAND is organized into eight packages of 128GB each, while Micron DRAM is divided into two packages. (Modafinil)

Main features

O WD Blue SSD is sold in 3 different capacities: 250GB, 500GB and 1TB, the latter equivalent to 1024GB. All have a higher write strength rating than the SanDisk X400 model. Incidentally, the Blue has one of the highest endurance ratings of any SSD on the market, with up to 400 TBW ou Terabytes Written. It still exceeds the rating in some capabilities of the Samsung 850 Pro, which comes with a 10-year warranty, and the Samsung 850 Evo. O Wd blue it is suitable for high demands, and even if its performance falls short of other drives, it should last a long time even when subjected to a write intensive workload.

Speed ​​and Performance

The unit achieves transfer speeds of up to 545MB / s ou 525MB / s in sequential read or write speed. Whereas speed rates are clearly crucial metrics for storage drives as there are few other features that can define them. THE Western Digital says that performance should be near the top of what is possible from SATA drives. It is worth remembering that these speeds are higher than those seen in the Samsung 850 Evo.

Price and availability

O WD Blue SSD is for sale at Kabum!, the 250GB versionBy R$539,90. Already the 1TB version only found at sellers Mercado Livre, at least until the end of this review, for prices ranging from R$1.440,00 to R$1.600,00.

Conclusion

O WD Blue SSD is a great solution, although the price of this type of unit still needs to drop further to be interesting to most users. In any case, one fact is clear: whoever exchanges his HDD traditional for a SSD drive you will see a considerable improvement in computer speed. And that usually pays off.

All versions of WD Blue SSD comes with 03 years warranty against manufacturer's defects, in addition to resistance rating of 400 TBW, that is, excellent. This is also a guarantee that you will be able to use this SSD much longer than some competitors, such as Samsung 850 Evo, which promises “only” 150TBW efficient and cost-effective R$2.199,00. For these reasons, we recommend purchasing.

Technical Specifications

For more information, visit the manufacturer's official website.