Western Digital WD10EZEX 1 TB PC Hard Drive - Blue, Mechanical Hard Disk

Product Information

As used for storage capacity, one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment. A WD Blue SATA Internal SSD can last up to 1.75M hours MTTF 2 (mean time to failure), with up to 600 TBW 3 (terabytes written), and has built in technology to correct errors in real time. In a traditional SSD with DRAM, the data that you're keeping is stored on the NAND flash chips that sit on the drive's printed circuit board (PCB). The data isn't static, though, and is constantly being moved around by the drive to ensure that no cells are being taxed much more than others and therefore wear down unevenly. This is a process called "wear leveling." Most of the drives we tested scored fairly even here, to the point where you only might notice a difference between the WD Blue SN550 and the Cardea II in applications like Adobe Premiere Pro with a stopwatch. Copy Tests

WD Blue 3D NAND Internal SSD M.2 SATA - 1 TB, Blue - High WD Blue 3D NAND Internal SSD M.2 SATA - 1 TB, Blue - High

Now, a drive can operate just fine without a DRAM chip installed. Instead, the "map" is stored either on the NAND flash chips themselves, or can be stored temporarily in the RAM of the system you're booting into. From the SSD maker's point of view, leaving off the DRAM saves on production cost, thereby making the drive cheaper to manufacture, and cheaper for consumers in the end. However, this can have a marked effect on drives that are used to store operating systems, programs, or games, all of which use shallow-depth 4K writes and reads.Last up is a series of file and folder transfers done in the SSD benchmarking utility AS-SSD. This trio of tests involves copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another… First, there's the overall PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark. This score represents how well drives do throughout the entire PCMark 10 run, and are the sanctioned scores presented by UL's software at the end of each run. This score includes a weighted average of every simulated activity that the PCMark 10 storage test runs, from copying files to launching games, booting an OS to running creative applications. It's a general indicator of how consistently a drive can perform through 23 different usage scenarios. The Western Digital Dashboard helps users maintain peak performance of the Western Digital SSD in Windows operating systems with a user-friendly graphical interface for the user. The Western Digital Dashboard includes tools for analysis of the disk (including the disk model, capacity, firmware version, and SMART attributes) and firmware updates.

Western Digital Blue 1 TB SATA 2.5-Inch Hard Drive

The higher lane allocation puts the SN550 on par with most other mainstream M.2 drives nowadays. One place I'd like to see a bit more muscle, though, is in the terabytes written (TBW) rating. For example, the Editors' Choice-winning Addlink S70 almost exactly doubles the TBW rating of the WD Blue SN550, while costing only roughly a third more. This doesn't mean the WD Blue SN550 is a poor value, per se, just that it may not be the right choice for write-happy users, such as content creators who scribe lots of gigabytes of data per day to their drives. DRAM? Where We're Going, We Don't Need DRAM In this test the WD Blue SN550 holds its own against pricier drives like the Patriot P300, while also keeping pace with performers like the Seagate and TeamGroup. Launching GamesBecause the data is moved around frequently, some SSDs use a smidge of DRAM—which is much faster to access and read than NAND flash—to "map out" the data, and provide a reference point for the drive so it knows where everything is. TBW (terabytes written) values calculated using JEDEC client workload (JESD219) and vary by product capacity. However, it should be noted, that these two tests don't tell the whole story of how a drive will perform for all creative applications. For example, cinema rendering programs like Cinema 4D may need to load dozens of different types of files at once, rather than just one large file like you might have encased in a Photoshop project or a movie that's being edited in Premiere. The ultra-compact M.2 2280 WD Blue SATA SSD Drive goes through extensive compatibility and reliability testing to ensure it meets the high standards of the WD brand.