Western Digital SN560E

[Error 504]

i was buying what was supposed to be SN550, but it turned out to be SN560E.

 

i went to wd website and searched for the product, but no result.

google didn't help much either.

 

is this like, engineer sample? it says "E", but no "S"

 

or some kind of knockoff? or some kind of cancelled product line?

 

it works, for now, and for a pretty good price. i'm just curious.

 

thanks.

[An0maly_76]

Western Digital offers a variety of color-coded series designed for specific types of usage. The SN560 apparently hails from the Black series, a nod to the gaming market, as they are generally faster than the more consumer-minded Blue series (that the SN550 / SN570 hails from).

[Error 504]

13 minutes ago, An0maly_76 said:

Western Digital offers a variety of color-coded series designed for specific types of usage. The SN560 apparently hails from the Black series, a nod to the gaming market, as they are generally faster than the more consumer-minded Blue series (that the SN550 / SN570 hails from).

i was just curious because i couldn't find any info even on wd official website.

 

thanks for the info.

[An0maly_76]

10 minutes ago, Error 504 said:

i was just curious because i couldn't find any info even on wd official website.

 

thanks for the info.

Here's one link I found about them... They're fairly new, hence the scarcity of info.

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/western-digital-sn850x-and-pcie-gen4-lineup

 

Word to the wise, these suckers run a bit hotter than the Blue, I actually returned an SN850 unopened after I found out that first, beyond 3500 Mbps isn't really a noticeable performance increase, and second, the Black series have been known to reach 90-100 degrees under heavy use -- not something I think should be attached to a motherboard.

Edited March 28, 2022 by An0maly_76
Revised, more info

[sandro27]

i took the m.2 nvme drive out of an sandisk external ssd to put it in my pc and it registered as an SN560E, if that is  any useful info for you

[Ryker Robb]

On 3/28/2022 at 1:14 AM, Error 504 said:

i was buying what was supposed to be SN550, but it turned out to be SN560E.

 

i went to wd website and searched for the product, but no result.

google didn't help much either.

 

is this like, engineer sample? it says "E", but no "S"

 

or some kind of knockoff? or some kind of cancelled product line?

 

it works, for now, and for a pretty good price. i'm just curious.

 

thanks.

I don't know if you figured this out already, but it appears this drive may have come from a wd black p40 external ssd: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17662/wd_black-p40-game-drive-usb-32-gen-2x2-portable-ssd-review , or similar type of external ssd. 

There's also a chance it could have come from some pre build pc or laptop.

[NewMaxx]

I can help here as I have a full spreadsheet with all these drives. There's multiple SN560 types but also the SN560E, with the "E" used in portable SSDs. For example, some had/have the SN550E, SN750E, etc. The SN560E is the older version of the SN560, the main difference being the controller used. CH SN560 uses the regular Polaris Mp16 controller and is x2 4.0 while the PC SN560 is Mp16+ and x4 4.0. In the SN560E's case, the first is switched to x4 PCIe 3.0. The controller difference is from original SN550 (Mp16) to SN570 SE/2TB + SN580 (Mp16+). The difference there is effectively just the bus speed, from 1200 to 1600 MT/s. For a 3.0 drive this has virtually no impact (it can give more max bandwidth for a 4.0, and a slight latency improvement). If buying this as an "SN560" this is closer to the x2 4.0 than the x4 4.0 (and x2 4.0 does translate to x4 3.0 in direct bandwidth with minor power efficiency differences, also WD is known to do this weird x2 PHY switch for CH drives as they are designed for whitelisted applications like the XBox).

 

I have no evidence of this but I believe the "E" models are designed for portable SSDs in a way that makes them potentially be capped in some ways when "shucked" for internal usage. This could be shown with lower sustained/TLC write performance, but I have not been able to test this myself. In any meaningful way you should compare it equal to the stock drive which, in this case, would be the updated SN550 with BiCS5 (112L). The original SN570 (<2TB, check Tom's Hardware) also uses this controller and flash combo at x4 3.0 so is the closest drive for a direct comparison in performance. The SN560E's firmware revision (232xWD) puts it right before the updated SN550 (233xWD) and original SN570 (234xWD) so this makes sense. So the drive you received both is and isn't what it was sold at ("SN560") but it's close enough.

 

tl;dr as this is mostly useless information - you got what is usually used for portable SSDs (enclosure with a bridge chip) that's basically a launch 1TB SN570, which is not a bad drive. I think regular SN560s often come in laptops and those are more like the SN580 which has a bit more bandwidth. (that $979 ASUS at Best Buy right now comes to mind)