Western Digital WD Blue SN570 500GB

amazon Western Digital WD Blue SN570 500GB reviews

In the past few years, when processing technologies have developed rapidly, a series of new graphics cards and CPUs have been released to the market to “pull the standard” of the graphics of new games. 4K level instead of just 1080p as during a long time, causing game makers to also rush into the “race” to upgrade graphics quality.

Most notably, with the quality of the character models being built in more detail, the cutscenes are upgraded to higher resolutions with more vivid multi-channel sound effects that make modern games more immersive. The amount of “bulging” is dizzying compared to previously released games.

Not only that, but these games also possess a huge data collection for each level, requiring extremely high data reading speeds, especially in open-world games with a large number of characters and objects. Giant bodies need to be rendered continuously during the movement of the character like Red Dead Redemption 2 or Grand Theft Auto V, for example, the amount of data to download per second can be up to hundreds of megabytes, “squeeze” Traditional HDDs even only render at 1080p resolution.

To solve this situation, both Sony and Microsoft decided to equip only high-speed NVMe standard hard drives for their new PlayStation 5 and XBOS Series X game consoles to overcome the storage bottleneck, helping Users have a smoother game experience with modern games, but that also means gamers have to “get used to” these super-fast hard drives, even if you’re a fan of the PC system traditional.

In the context that many gamers are still afraid of the expensive price of NVMe SSDs, Western Digital has recently introduced to gamers a high-speed, large-capacity storage solution that still owns an extremely attractive price with the all-new Western Digital WD Blue SN570 product line with many bright and impressive upgrades compared to the previous WD Blue SN550 product line.

It must be said that for a very long time, the WD Blue HDD product line has always been a familiar choice for most mainstream gamers because of its relatively soft price, stable performance, and reading speed stable, fully meeting the needs of storage and gaming, although the WD Black product line is always appreciated with products that are “labeled” specifically for gamers.

So when it comes to the “SSD era”, the fact that Western Digital still maintains this product line with very special design philosophy, aiming for reasonable performance at a price has always been popular with mid-range gamers.

Right from the packaging stage, it can be seen that the WD Blue SN570 still maintains the familiar style from the previous SN550 version with two blue / white colors dividing the front, only slightly different in the product image.

Most notably, the maximum speed of this product line is recorded at 3500MBps, close to the “max” of the current M.2 standard using PCIe 3.0 technology instead of 2400MBps as on the previous version.

This can be seen as the most significant upgrade of the WD Blue product line in the context that hard drives using the PCIe 4.0 standard are gradually being popularized on the market, no longer a “rare” like the time of microprocessors. AMD Ryzen 3000 Series and X570 motherboards came out a few years ago.

The back does not have too much information, except that this model of the NVMe series hard drive is covered by a warranty of up to 5 years.

Conducting “unboxing” the product, it can be seen that the WD Blue SN570 has a fairly simple structure when compared to many other NVMe SSD models on the market.

Designed with a blue PCB board, slightly leaning towards the familiar green color, the WD Blue solid-state drive model also has only one main memory chip.

This is a line of BiCS5 TLC (Triple-level Cell) memory chips made with 3D NAND technology consisting of multiple stacked layers, increasing the storage level per silicon base with a maximum stacking capacity of up to 112 layers much higher than the 96 layers of the previous BiCS4 generation.

This memory chip is provided by Sandisk, a “sub” brand of Western Digital in memory chip solutions.

In addition, there is a controller chip that is “homegrown”, with a DRAM-less design to optimize the price of the product, although this can make the hard drive operate at a slower speed bit of control chips manufactured by Phison equipped on high-end SSD hard drives of the SN750 series.

The company has slightly upgraded this controller chip so that the WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD series can achieve higher read/write speeds than its elder version.

It is noteworthy that with a mid-range NVMe SSD, the manufacturer has not integrated a hardware-based AES 256-bit key security solution, so this hard drive model is not too suitable for uses that need security. However, this is suitable for general users and the vast majority of gamers.

The back of the hard drive is quite “smooth”, without any components or circuit boards.

A quick test of the drive with the CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 scorer, can see the sequential read speed of this product up to 3555.99MBps, surpassing the 3500MBps that Western Digital “advertises” on the box.

The random read speed of RND4K Q32T16 also reached 1534.15MBps, quite high, only slightly inferior to some NVMe SSDs using the high-end PCIe 4.0 standard.

This metric is extremely important for modern games that have to upload a lot of large data at the same time, especially high-resolution surface textures in open-world games, or titles game has a modern sandbox screen.

When testing on recently released open-world games, the WD Blue SN570 offers an extremely impressive experience for the writer.

First of all, a few popular open-world games like Borderlands 3, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or Grand Theft Auto V benefit first when the game load time is reduced from 50% to 70%, significantly enhancing the game the player’s excitement through time.

Particularly with the popular virtual reality game Half-life: Alyx, players will not have to wait for a few minutes each scene with a heavy set of virtual reality glasses on their face without any activity.

In addition, games with large amounts of data, often having trouble with traditional hard drive bandwidth such as Horizon Zero Dawn PC or Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord can work smoothly with a large number of data uploads in time with the player’s progress, even if you are riding at high speed, eliminating a problem that causes many gamers discomfort when playing with HDDs normally.

As a high-speed solid-state drive for the general user segment, the WD Blue SN570 also has its problems, but in general, these problems are not too big and do not have a clear impact on the gamer’s experience.

First of all, this hard drive model has a small high-speed SLC cache, only about 8GB-9GB on the 500GB version that the writer tested, which is quite small even when compared to some versions of the drive USB 3.2 external solid-state drive of the same size and price.

In actual use, this factor has a great impact on users who need to work with larger files, perhaps affecting gamers in the process of restoring backup copies of games.

As for most of the time using and playing games, this factor has almost no effect.

In addition, with the “upgrade” for the hard drive to operate at higher speeds, the WD Blue SN570 is also hotter than the “predecessor” SN550, but still within the normal operating limits of the hard drive.

For most gamers who use hard drives for PC systems, even mid-range motherboards are equipped with integrated heatsinks, so users do not need to worry about this problem because the hard drive will always be used to keep within the ideal operating temperature.

However, for gamers on consoles like PlayStation 5, you should use a hard drive with a heatsink to avoid overheating because these systems have a rather small and tight hard drive space design, with no support from external cooling fans.

where can you get a Western Digital WD Blue SN570 500GB online

Western Digital 500GB WD Blue SN570 NVMe Internal Solid State Drive SSD – Gen3 x4 PCIe 8Gb/s, M.2 2280, Up to 3,500 MB/s – WDS500G3B0C: Buy it now

Western Digital 500GB WD Blue 3D NAND Internal PC SSD & Western Digital 500GB WD Blue SN570 NVMe Internal Solid State Drive SSD – Gen3 x4 PCIe 8Gb/s, M.2 2280, Up to 3,500 MB/s – WDS500G3B0C: Buy it now