Western Digital has released a new budget friendly SSD that got a serious jump in model number, since the company decided to call it the SN5000. Its predecessor is the SN580 launched just under a year ago and price wise, it's the better option of the two. The new SN5000 uses the same BiCS 5 TLC NAND as the SN580 on the 500 GB to the 2 TB SKU, but according to Anandtech, the 4 TB uses BiCS 6 QLC NAND. The SN5000 is still a PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe drive, but the overall performance has been significantly improved. If we use the 1 TB SKU for comparison, then the sequential read speeds have gone up by 1 GB/s from 4150 MB/s to 5150 MB/s. The sequential write speed is up 750 MB/s from 4150 MB/s to 4900 MB/s.

As for random performance, the read IOPS are up from 600K IOPS to 730K IOPS and the write IOPS are up slightly from 750K to 770K. The 4 TB QLC SKU is said to deliver even better performance with the exception of the random read IOPS. The 1 TB SKU is said to have a write endurance of 600 TBW, but the 4 TB SKU only offers 1200 TBW. That's 0.33 drive writes per day (DWPD) for the 1 TB SKU vs. 0.16 DWPD for the 4 TB SKU, showing the weakness of the QLC NAND. A new feature for the SN5000 series compared to previous WD Blue NVMe drives is support for TGC Pyrite 2.01 encryption. The WD SN5000-series starts at US$70 for the 500 GB model, going up to US$80 for 1 TB, US$140 for 2 TB and topping out at US$280 for the 4 TB model. WD only seems to have the 500 GB model in stock, with all the others being available in 3-4 weeks time. All SKUs come with a five year warranty.

In today's world demand for visual brilliance and digital content creation is skyrocketing, paving the way for more advanced technologies that support the production and consumption of rich content. For consumers, students, and professionals, fast, reliable tools are a must-have to keep their imaginations flowing. Building upon its award-winning SSD portfolio, Western Digital released the WD Blue SN580 NVMe solid state drive (SSD). The new, NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 internal flash drive is purpose-built for the creative enthusiast community and professionals to use when upgrading current PCs or elevating a custom build.

"As creator workflows become more robust and complex with heavy applications and large multimedia assets like 4K video, it's easy to become frustrated with long load times," said Eric Spanneut, vice president of client and enterprise SSDs for Western Digital. "The new WD Blue SN580 NVMe SSD boosts productivity, so professionals and entrepreneurial creators can focus on bringing their imaginations to life without having to wait long for files to transfer or programs to load."

[Editor's note: Our in-depth review of the SN580 is now live]

It appears that Western Digital is getting ready to expand its budget line of WD Blue SSDs with yet another model, this time a smaller jump from the SN570 to the SN580, compared to the jump in model numbers from the SN550 to the SN570. The drive has passed through the PCI-SIG integrators list and from that information we only know it's a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive with a four lane interface. However, some retailers have already put up the drive for pre-order and this helps us with a few more details.

For starters, it appears that we're once again looking at drives in the 500 GB to the 2 TB range, although this doesn't mean that WD couldn't launch a 4 TB variant as well, but it seems unlikely. What we also learnt is that these product pages are place holders, as the drives are listed for the same, or higher pricing than the WD Black SN850X, which makes no sense for a budget drive which should be closer to the US$100/€100 mark than the equivalent of twice that. Another European retailer is also listing the current SN570 as being EOL:ed on the 31st of July, suggesting that the SN580 should launch around that date. The same retailer is listing the SN580 as the replacement drive under its part number, which is WDS200T3B0E for the 2 TB SKU.