It is reported that when the SLC is exhausted, the performance of the WD Blue SN550 SSD is reduced by half
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Western Digital Blue SN550 M.2 NVMe SSD, known as The best solid state drive In the market, there may be danger of losing a place.Chinese news media Preview According to reports, Western Digital may have replaced the flash memory on the Blue SN550 SSD, which will negatively affect its performance when the SLC (single-level cell) cache is exhausted.
The global semiconductor shortage is causing severe damage to the computer hardware industry. Especially storage vendors have responded to the component crisis by modifying their SSD recipes. The current reality is that the SSDs that have just been launched today may no longer use the same components, because manufacturers are purchasing components from the available components. Problems arise when changes are not communicated to consumers.
Well-known brands, including Needle, patriot recent, Critical Some of the most popular SSD components have been replaced. According to Expreview’s findings, Western Digital appears to be the latest name to join the club.
Western Digital did not immediately respond to a request for comment. If the company responds, this story will be updated.
WD Blue SN550 revision
| SSD | Flash memory | firmware |
|---|---|---|
| WD Blue SN550 (new version) | 002031 1T00 | 233010WD |
| WD Blue SN550 (previous version) | 60523 1T00 | 211070WD |
| WD green SN350 | 060947 1T00 | 231800WD |
WD Blue SN550 uses WD controller (SanDisk 20-82-01008-A1) and SanDisk 96-layer BiCS4 3D TLC NAND flash memory, part number 60523 1T00. Expreview recently purchased the WD Blue SN550 produced on July 28, 2021. The publication states that the NAND flash memory in the new version carries the part number 002031 1T00.
In addition to the difference in NAND flash memory, the new version also comes with different firmware. The original WD Blue SN550 uses the 211070WD firmware, and the new model uses the 233010WD firmware. Strangely, the firmware of WD Green SN350 also starts with 23.
The old version and the new version of the firmware are not interchangeable. You cannot flash the 233010WD firmware on a device with 211070WD firmware, and vice versa. In fact, the Western Digital Dashboard software did not even get the 233010WD firmware for the old device. This seems to tell us that some changes have taken place at the hardware level. Since Expreview confirmed that the new version still uses the SanDisk 20-82-01008-A1 SSD controller, NAND flash memory is the only other possibility.
WD Blue SN550 performance
| SSD | Average write without SLC cache (MBps) | The average number of writes to the SLC cache (MBps) | SLC cache (GB) | Total capacity (GB) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SanDisk Extreme 1TB | 849 | 1,945 | 12 | 931.1 |
| WD Blue SN550 1TB (new version) | 390 | 2,160 | 12 | 931.3 |
| WD Green SN350 960GB | 376 | 2,030 | 10 | 894.1 |
The TxBENCH results of Expreview show that as long as the SLC cache is not filled, both versions of WD Blue SN550 provide similar write performance. The average write performance of WD Blue SN550 is 2,160 MBps. Once the SLC cache is exhausted, the write performance drops to 390 MBps.
Although Expreview did not provide figures for the previous revision, the outlet claims a 50% performance drop. This means that when the SLC cache is full, the original WD Blue SN550 should provide approximately 780 MBps of write performance.On the other hand, the write performance provided by the new version is only slightly better than inferior quality WD green SN350.
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