Introduction

Western Digital (or simply WD) is the world's largest manufacturer of storage solutions, mostly known for their wide range of hard disk offerings. With their acquisition of SanDisk in 2016, WD became one of the largest manufacturers for flash storage, too.



Today, we have for review the WD Blue NVMe SN570, which was released in October as a drive targeted at "creators," at least according to the press release. Considering the "570" number, the drive is actually a value-oriented M.2 NVMe designed to replace the SN550 that was released two years ago.

Internally, the WD Blue SN570 uses a SanDisk controller paired with the latest 112-layer 3D TLC flash from Toshiba, also known as BiCS5. A DRAM cache is not available, definitely to reduce manufacturing cost. To connect with the rest of the system, the older PCI-Express 3.0 interface is used.

The WD Blue NVMe SN570 comes in capacities of 250 GB ($40), 512 GB ($50), and 1 TB ($90). Endurance for these models is set to 150 TBW, 300 TBW, and 600 TBW respectively. WD includes a five-year warranty with the SN570 SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the WD Blue SN570 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.
The PCB is almost empty, it's just two chips: the controller and one NAND flash package; the other side of the PCB is completely empty.

Chip Component Analysis

Almost nothing is known about this SanDisk 20-82-10023-A1 SSD controller. It is a four-channel design, which obviously supports TLC and DRAM-less operation.


The single flash chip is Toshiba's latest BiCS5 112-layer TLC NAND with a capacity of 8 Tbit, or 1 TB.

Test Setup