WD’s new Blue SN550 is a nice improvement on the older SN500, though it still isn’t going to worry the competition with its performance. However, other vendors sure won’t be happy that it’s 10 cents per gigabyte at the 1TB capacity.
Design and features
The WD Blue SN550 is a x4 PCIe 3.0, M.2 NVMe SSD in the 2280 form factor. That is, 22 millimeters wide, and 80 mm long. The NAND is 96-layer TLC (Triple Layer Cell/3-bit) with an unspecified percentage utilized as SLC (Single Level Cell/1-bit) cache. More on that later.
The 1TB SN550 we tested is $100 on Amazon (10 cents a gigabyte), while the 500GB is $70 on Amazon, and the 250GB flavor costs $50 on Amazon. While I didn’t find any better deals on a 1TB drive, I did find several cheaper 250GB and 500GB drives, so it’s the highest capacity where you’ll get the best bang for the buck.