WD Blue SSD WDS250G1B0A 250 GB

Keep up with the times

Someone, but Western Digital, certainly cannot be called a little-known brand of computer components. That's just WD, unexpectedly, in addition to hard drives, began to produce solid-state drives. And we are not talking about hybrid drives (a capacious HDD plus a small SSD for caching), but about full-fledged SSDs devoid of any mechanical elements. WD took over the business not from scratch, but by buying out SanDisk, which produced SSDs not a lot, not a little, by order of Apple.

To the limit

WD named its first SSD the exact same name as its most popular series of hard drives, Blue. The novelty is built on a bundle of SanDisk TLC flash memory and a Micron controller (similar components are used in the SanDisk X400). Sequential read and write speeds for the 250 GB model are 540 and 500 Mbps, respectively, which is practically the ceiling of the SATA III interface (compatibility with previous generations of SATA, but with speed limits).

Toughie

Recall that TLC memory chips (three bits of data per memory cell) wear out quite quickly - only 1K rewriting cycles. Fortunately, for a 250 GB Blue SSD, an endurance of 100 TB of recorded data is claimed, which is about a third more than other low-cost TLC solid-states of the same volume. This WD Blue SSD can be recommended to anyone who needs a fast and moderately hardy drive.