It doesn’t seem that long ago that the scoop was, “NVMe is great, but it’s gonna cost you big time.” Now, thanks to drives like WD’s new Blue SN500 (available on Amazon), price simply isn’t that big of an issue. At least not when you consider the 4X boost in speed it delivers. For most users, not having to wait for their computer anymore is worth a little extra cash.

The Blue SN500 itself is a good performer that holds firm on long writes, unlike much of the similarly-priced competition. It’s certainly a kick in the pants compared to SATA.

Design and features

As with all NVMe drive for mainstream machines, the Blue SN500 uses the M.2 connector and is 22 millimeters wide. Also like the majority, it’s 80 millimeters long. You get the occasional shorty, such as Toshiba’s RC100, but 80mm is the norm. It’s PCIe 3.0 x2, which limits maximum throughput to 2GBps. We didn’t see quite that, but remembering that SATA is only about 550MBps, that’s still quite fast compared to what many are used to. 

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