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 are taking a look at the WD Red SA500 SSD, which is optimized to provide fast storage for your NAS system. Since the NAS is always on, WD has engineered the SA500 in a way that's "specifically designed and tested for 24/7 usage."

Internally, the WD Red SA500 uses a Marvell 88SS1074 controller—a model we've previously seen on the Crucial MX300 and Kingston UV500. While it is an older model from circa 2014, it still has plenty of punch for a modern SATA SSD. It has also seen a lot of use, so it is known to run stable and operate bug-free. As expected, the flash chips come from WD subsidiary SanDisk, who produces them in collaboration with Toshiba. The Western Digital WD Red SA500 is available in capacities of 500 GB ($83), 1 TB ($143), 2 TB ($283), and 4 TB ($678). M.2 SATA (not NVMe) versions are available, too. Endurance is rated at 350 TBW, 600 TBW, 1300 TBW, and 2500 TBW respectively. All models come with a 5-year warranty.

In our review, we're taking a look at the WD Red SA500 1 TB version, which offers a good mix between capacity and cost.

Packaging and Contents

The Drive

The drive conforms to the dimensions set forth by the 2.5" form factor. It is made out of plastic and is only 7 mm thick, which ensures it will fit everywhere.


Western Digital's WD Red SSD uses the SATA 6 Gbps interface. It is compatible with any older SATA standard, but will in such a case work at reduced performance.


On the rather compact PCB, you'll find four NAND flash chips (two on each side), the controller, and a DRAM chip.


The Marvell 88SS1074 6 Gb/s flash controller supports four flash channels. It was released in 2014 and is built using 28 nm fab technology.


The four TLC flash chips are made by SanDisk in collaboration with Toshiba. They are built using 64 layers on a 15 nanometer 3D NAND production process.


A single Nanya DDR3-1600 DRAM chip provides 512 MB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup