A lightning review the WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD, a new NVMe SSD drive from WD. It’s not the fastest drive they make, but it does fit nicely into a nice sweet spot of speed and affordability.
Currently it comes in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB storage sizes, but a 2TB model is coming out later in 2022. It also comes with a 5 year warranty, which is pretty good for peace of mind.
Note that it is a M.2 NVMe and so has the PCie 3.0 connector. I could go on about the specs of the drive, but you can read the spec sheet on WD’s website. Lets instead talk about how it actually worked.
It’s generally designed to be used a a drive in PC, but since I use Macs and they aren’t exactly designed to be opened anymore I installed it in a Sabrent Thunderbolt 3 enclosure and installed the latest beta of Mac OS Monterey on it.
In this scenario I found it worked really well. I used this setup for about 3 days straight. Now of course you don’t need a particularly fast drive for everyday admin type stuff on a computer, which I used it for. But I also used it as my main drive to work on a small video editing project. In this project I was editing 4K footage shot on a Mavic 3 drone.
The drive handled it like a champ. I was playing back 2-3 streams at the same time, applying effects and colour grading the footage. At no time did the drive hiccup or drop frames. So I’d be more than happy to use this drive as a main drive on my system or even as external storage to edit off off, once the 2TB model comes out.
Here are the results I got from my speed test when I using it purely as an external drive and not booting off of it.
At $160 AUD for the 1TB model, this is a good value buy for those looking for a good drive, that whilst not the fastest, will do just fine and it good value.
