Overall and Final Verdict
With the original SN500 and even with the SN550 from the WD Blue lineup, these drives have been one of my go to suggestions when people ask for good overall drives. They aren’t ever the top performing drive but Western Digital makes a drive that falls right in the mid-range of performance, gives them a good warranty, and prices them well. It’s a nice bonus that they typically look good, even if some people may prefer a black PCB for it to blend in. For the SN570 none of that has changed. The new drive has a similar styling with a bare blue PCB and sticker on top that matches. The new drive is a little off on the PCB color with it being more of a blue-grey than in the past. My only issue when it comes to looks for the SN570 was with the packaging and how a lot of retailers have the drive advertised, they are using a rendering of the drive with a full-length sticker that looks nothing like the actual drive. Aesthetics aren’t that important with an M.2 drive, especially with most getting hidden under heatsinks these days. But I still don’t like the idea of thinking something looks one way and getting something different.
Beyond that though the SN570 has the same 5-year warranty that they have offered in the past. Performance was solid in most of our tests, it outperformed the other PCIe 3.0 drives tested and in some cases would edge up past the performance of some of the 4.0 drives as well. It did struggle in a few situations, namely when I was transferring large movies and in our 4k QD16 IOPS test. But it made up for that in our real-world file transfer test with pictures and small documents. Being a creator focused drive, the picture transfer performance is important, but large video files would be as well. Depending on your focus the SN570 may be great or underperform. What you see for write performance will also depend a lot on your drive size, we tested at 1TB but the small 250GB drive is advertised with much slower speeds and the 2TB drive is faster. The simple design with the NAND down on one end and the controller on the other helped keep things cool as well.
Of course, the pricing is what will make or break the SN570, just like the drives before it. The 1TB model that I tested today has an MSRP of $109 on the Western Digital website but is marked down on their website to $99. You can find it for that same $99.99 on Amazon then on Newegg it is $104.99 currently. Some of the older PCIe 3.0 drives including the SN550 are now selling for $89.99 and the high-end 3.0 drives are up near $150 so the SN570’s price looks to be solid, especially considering the performance improvement over the SN550. It is a drive I would recommend unless you are planning on using it for large video files.
Live Pricing: HERE
