WD Red SA500 M.2 WDS100T1R0B 1 TB

Red Baron

The WD Red SA500 M.2 is Western Digital's Red Series SSD de jure for RAID arrays, NAS storage, home and small office servers. But given that WD Red's focus is on increased reliability and durability, it makes sense to use this SSD in desktop PCs and laptops for professional work. The volume can vary from 500 GB to 2 TB.

Choice Chips

As you might guess from the name, the drive is made in the newfangled M.2 form factor. The connector has two B&M keys, which clearly indicates the use of a SATA 3 (6 Gbps) interface. From this follows the ceiling of the linear speed: 560 MB / s for reading and 530 MB / s for writing. The aforementioned interface is simply not capable of missing more. Although WD/SanDisk's (now one company) hand-picked 3D TLC BICS 3 flash memory chips are clearly capable of more.

Four times faster than competitors

The high potential of the chips is confirmed by the solid sequential write speed of very large volumes of data at a time after exceeding the virtual SLC array — as much as 400 MB / s. This is four times faster than most other TLC SSDs, and eight times faster than low-cost QLCs. A separate DDR3 buffer memory chip adds even more performance.

Two heads are better

The “brain” of the WD Red SA500 M.2 is a dual-core, eight-channel controller Marvell 88SS1074, capable of delivering as much as 95 and 85K IOPS (input-output operations per second) during random reading and writing of the smallest files, respectively. This again is the ceiling of possibilities for SATA SSDs. Exactly the same controller, as well as flash and RAM chips, is installed in the 2.5-inch WD Red SA500 modification. That is, the disks differ only in form factor.

Enhanced endurance

All in all, the WD Red SA500 M.2 is undoubtedly one of the fastest M.2 SATA SSDs on the market. It successfully combines a multi-channel controller, a separate buffer RAM chip and selected flash memory, which guarantees high speed recording even of very large files. And the rewriting resource of the terabyte model is more than 600 TB, and the warranty is 5 years. The WD Red SA500 M.2 also has a more affordable twin brother WD Blue 3D M.2, but with a shorter operating time and a reduced warranty (400 TB, 3 years). Most importantly, before buying, check if your PC or laptop has an M.2 slot, and whether it definitely supports M.2 SATA drives.