WD Blue SSD review: Fast, durable but comes at high price

Having fast transfer speed, the WD Blue SSD is an excellent choice for consumers who are looking for instant responsiveness, durability and low-power consumption to boost their PCs or laptops.

Having fast transfer speed, the WD Blue SSD is an excellent choice for consumers who are looking for instant responsiveness, durability and low-power consumption to boost their PCs or laptops.

Designed to drive Solid State Drive (SSD) adoption in mainstream computing platforms for both corporates and consumers, US-based data storage company Western Digital(WD) recently introduced a new Blue SSD that is optimised for multitasking and resource-heavy applications.

Priced at ₹9,500, WD Blue SSD has a SATA 6Gb/s interface, is available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities.

It is available in both 2.5-inch/7mm case or M.2 2280 form factors to accommodate most laptops and desktop PCs.

What works?

To test the SSD's performance, we installed it on a test bed that includes Intel Pentium G3240 CPU clocked at 3.10GHz paired up with 4GB of RAM and running Windows 7 Professional operating system.

In "Crystal Disk Mark" benchmark, it delivered 281.8 MB/s read and 271.5 MB/s write speed and with "HD Tune Pro", it delivered minimum read speed of 217.3 MB/s and maximum 242.0MB/s read speed with an access time of 0.042 milli-second.

In real life test, when we transferred assorted data of approximately 14GB (including videos, documents and images) from a USB 3.0 drive to SSD, it took about five minutes and 50 seconds to complete the process.

Overall, the SSD ran seamlessly on demanding applications.

The drive includes WD SSD Dashboard software which allows continuous performance and capacity monitoring and is free for download.

What does not work?

The SSD comes at a higher price in comparison to Samsung 850 Evo.

Conclusion: Having fast transfer speed, the WD Blue SSD is an excellent choice for consumers who are looking for instant responsiveness, durability and low-power consumption to boost their PCs or laptops.