WD Red SA500 1TB SSD Review

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i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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by the company that used smr in nas oriented hdds :D

Edit: And now without cynical comments.
No power loss protection for a “red” SSD?
These drives probably target the soho nas where you have "write once, read many times" workloads and don't need write amplification. For that market these drives are okayish.
 
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Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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Why does anybody make a new 1 or 2tb sata m.2 ?
Maybe 4tb would be interesting at a great price or an 8TB 7mm 2.5” again at a great price...

Otherwise why the market has moved on hasn’t it ? Either NVMe for fast or maybe some market left for high capacity and low power bulk storage but this is just a nothing release.
 

WillTaillac

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Feb 28, 2020
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Why does anybody make a new 1 or 2tb sata m.2 ?
My day job is working at a MSP covering small businesses, and I can assure you that plenty of businesses still have less than 1TB of data. 4TB and 8TB drives are great and all, but the size of a Quickbooks file, Excel document, PDF, and other such business items really hasn't scaled up as much as drive capacity (SSD or HDD) in the past while.

I actually just went and looked, and the average size of the offsite backup dataset for my clients has definitely gone up; in 2013 it was 541GB and as of yesterday it was 1438GB. While that represents a fairly large 2.6x increase in data, it still doesn't represent much given the 7 year passage of time. And my 1438GB number is also somewhat skewed by a handful of clients with much larger datasets (6TB+) that drag the overall average a bit higher.

You might also ask "why SATA"? And the answer to that is simple; it is cheaper, easier to connect, and lots of places do not need the speed. 95% of my small business clients still operate on 1 GbE networks, so why would you need NVMe on your file server if everyone is accessing it remotely via 1 GbE NICs?

I'm not trying to "make a case" for this drive, but there is a not-insignificant portion of the market that still hasn't even made the jump to SSD, let alone higher tiers of SSD. I can understand the intended positioning in the market. I just picked up a new client last week that bought a brand new Dell server in 1Q2019 that shipped with 2.4TB 10K SAS drives; I wanted to reach back in time and slap them for not getting SSDs.
 

WANg

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Jun 10, 2018
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Why does anybody make a new 1 or 2tb sata m.2 ?
Maybe 4tb would be interesting at a great price or an 8TB 7mm 2.5” again at a great price...

Otherwise why the market has moved on hasn’t it ? Either NVMe for fast or maybe some market left for high capacity and low power bulk storage but this is just a nothing release.
Well, SATA M.2 is still quite prevalent on the corporate NUCs (TinyMiniMicros) and as boot media on servers. It's also there to conserve PCIe lanes in case you don't want to use it for NVMe, and unlike NVMe, you don't need to strap heat sinks and thermal blocks on M.2 SATA drives since they tend to run cooler.

There's a business case to be made about a very small form factor storage medium for use cases where, not too long ago, you would've tossed in a 5400rpm 2.5" HDD (and you'll be lucky to get about 130MB/sec sustained on spinners)
 

WANg

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Jun 10, 2018
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by the company that used smr in nas oriented hdds :D

Edit: And now without cynical comments.

These drives probably target the soho nas where you have "write once, read many times" workloads and don't need write amplification. For that market these drives are okayish.
Yeah, but then, it's a bit of an in-betweener, isn't it? The DWPD/TBW value is not significantly better than the consumer drives that it competes against (Micron MX500 (cheaper, performs at roughly the same level but not as durable) or Samsung 860 Evo (more expensive, just as durable and slightly better performing) ), it doesn't have the significantly better DWPD or PLP features that enterprise drive has (Seagate Ironwolf 1100 (great but expensive) or Micron 5200 series (cheaper than the Ironwolf), and since it's SATA and not DRAM-less, they are all pretty much constrained by the SATA interface anyways.
It's kinda hard to point out a killer feature other than maybe pricing, and even then with the recent WD Red hijinks I would feel better spending an extra 10-15 per drive for a Samsung (which might drop in price anyways).