I purchased one of these as I was looking to add more storage to a gaming laptop and this very one (WD Blue SN550 1TB) caught my eye, solely because of it's outstanding value for money. Nobody can deny that £69.99 for a 1TB PCIe solid-state storage drive, with blazing fast NVMe speeds is an exceptionally great price! Granted, it's definitely not the fastest SSD on the market, but for my purpose, it's more than sufficient. And I guess the same will go for many others out there looking to buy a storage drive for that same reason too. So I did my research and went for this one!
Just for some background, the machine I fitted this too is an MSI GE66-10UG Raider, which by default has 1TB of storage. The pre-installed drive is also a WD, but it's an SN730 (which is basically the same drive as a Black SN750, but an OEM model number), but whilst 1TB might seem like quite a lot, by modern day standards it isn't. Some Steam games can be as much as 100GB each and as a YouTuber, video files can be HUGE! So I basically just wanted a drive for mass storage purposes.
All I use this for mostly is to store my Videos folder, other games (such as slightly older non-Steam games, emulators and roms) and somewhere for recording apps, such as Elgato and OBS to record to. This drive ticked all of those boxes for me. In fact, for that use, it's probably overkill. The pre-installed drive (SN730) I will continue to use my Windows installation, programs, Steam games and personal files, such as documents.
Of course, if you want to use this drive for an OS Installation, it's still probably more than sufficient, given the read and write speeds in the attached image. And of course, it'll blow any SATA based SSD out of the water, so remember that!
Installation was very easy! The hardest part is accessing the M.2 slot, and that is it. My laptop was quite a pain to open up and get into, but that shouldn't be the case for most other laptops and especially desktop machines. One thing I would love to note is, I installed this "as is", and didn't bother to do anything with thermal pads or a heatsink and it runs at similar temperatures, if not quite a bit cooler in some circumstances than the SN730. I'm more than sure this will last. After all, this drive is designed to be budget friendly, easy to install and cool running and it does indeed excel at all of those.
So overall, I can strongly recommend this drive. Especially being more than sufficient for mass storage, if there is nowhere to put a 2.5" drive, like pretty much all of the new MSI laptops don't. And also as a main drive too. Unless perhaps you're building a super high-end rig. But still, if you are looking to save some cost somewhere, this is a very good answer and will suffice greatly.
TL;DR: If you're looking for a fast storage drive for exceptional value... JUST BUY THIS ONE!!!
| Brand | Western Digital |
|---|---|
| Product Dimensions | 8 x 2.21 x 0.24 cm; 6.35 g |
| Item model number | WDS500G3B0C |
| Manufacturer | Western Digital |
| Series | WDS500G3B0C |
| Colour | Blue |
| Form Factor | small form factor |
| RAM Size | 8 GB |
| Hard Drive Size | 1 TB |
| Hard Disk Description | Solid State Drive |
| Hard Drive Interface | NVMe |
| Wattage | 3600 |
| Hardware Platform | PC |
| Are Batteries Included | No |
| Lithium Battery Energy Content | 2 Kilowatt Hours |
| Lithium Battery Packaging | Batteries packed with equipment |
| Lithium Battery Weight | 2 g |
| Number Of Lithium Ion Cells | 5 |
| Number of Lithium Metal Cells | 5 |
| Item Weight | 6.35 g |
| Guaranteed software updates until | unknown |
