WD Blue SA510 SATA SSD Poor Performance

[EJ_Tech]

 

One of the SSDs I choose when upgrading older laptops that still use a mechanical HDD is the WD Blue SA510 SATA SSD. In my head I was thinking it's just another WD Blue SATA SSD, a solid mid-range SSD from a reputable known brand manufacturer. But I've started to notice weird performance issues during the initial wave of Windows Updates that come after a Windows clean install. The laptop would kinda stop responding for a few seconds, then be snappy again. I thought it's just the usually dual core processor in the computer at 100% utilization. That was until I decided to open Task Manager while a computer is doing updates when I saw this SSD be pinned at 100% for several seconds then come down. Odd. I don't notice this kind of behavior even on other cheaper SSDs.

 

This laptop only have an Ivy Bridge Intel Core i5-3210M (2-core 4-thread processor from 10 years ago) and it is sometimes bottlenecked by a WD Blue SSD especially from a fresh install like this.

So I decided to buy one for myself. I bought a WD Blue SA510 500GB SATA SSD for $43 and benchmarked it to the best of my knowledge and abilities and the results were so surprising that I'm still having doubts if I did my tests right. For comparison, I also tested it against other dram-less SSDs like the PNY CS900 500GB SATA, a Hyundai C2S3T 120G that I bought for $12 just because of the Hyundai brand on the SSD, and the now DRAM-less Fattydove Racing 120GB SSD. I also compared it to DRAM equipped SATA SSDs that I do have which are the Crucial MX500 500GB, and old Crucial M550, and my very first SSD the Kingston V300 240GB "bait-and-switch" edition.

 

I used my personal custom build to do these tests with the SSDs connected directly to the motherboard using SATA 3 without the use of any SATA to USB adapters.

• AMD Ryzen 7 5800x
• Corsair LPX 16GB DDR4 3200 MHz (8x2 kit)
• Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe boot drive
• MSI B550-A PRO
• Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders
• Windows 10 Pro 21H2

 

With CrystalDiskMark sequential read and writes, nothing is crazy bad or anything with the WD Blue SA510. My Crucial MX500 is actually at a disadvantage being half full of data and not formatted clean at all yet it is still a chart topper. At the bottom is my very first SSD, the Kingston V300 "bait-and-switch" edition with the Micron 20mn NAND alongside the DRAM-less PNY CS900.

Randoms is where things get a bit interesting. The DRAM-less PNY CS900 that I bought for just $29 is the one performing very poorly when it comes to random writes but is performing quite well in random reads which matters the most, in my opinion. My Kingston V300 "switcharoo" SSD performs the least in random reads but compared to the WD Blue Scorpio spinning rust it replaces, it was still a big upgrade for me back in 2016.

I still don't fully understand how to properly interpret ATTO Disk Benchmark results and I basically just copied Anantech's settings: 32 GB file size, Bypass Write Cache, Queue Depth of 4. But something tells me that the very low numbers of the WD Blue SA510 is correlated with the poor performance it's getting when doing that initial wave of Windows Updates after a clean install.

The Hyundai C2S3T and Fattydove Racing despite being sub-$20 120GB cheapo SSDs are performing relatively fine.

The spreadsheet (limited to SATA SSDs that are still in my possession)

 

ATTO (MB/s)

 

ATTO (IOPS)

 

 

But wait, there's more! I took it apart to see...a DRAM-less and single NAND flash SSD.

I'm pretty sure the WD Blue SATA SSDs are supposed to have a DRAM cache with the WD Green being DRAM-less.

DRAM-less is forgivable on their WD Blue NVMe SSDs thanks to Host Memory Buffer (HMB) doing its job, but not so much on a SATA SSD that costs more than other DRAM-less options like the PNY CS900, and (as of December 2022) only $10 cheaper than something with DRAM like the Crucial MX500 and Samsung 870 EVO.

 

SanDisk A101-000125-B0 controller

Nothing on the back.

SanDisk 0G6744-512G NAND flash (if I read that right)

 

By contrast look at the PNY CS900 with eight NAND flash chips. Still DRAM-less but it is also cheaper, somehow.

 

Phison PS3111-S11-13 single-core, 2-channel controller

 

 

4 more NAND chips on the back

For fun, here's the Hyundai C2S3T 120 GB SSD

 

The now unfortunately DRAM-less Fattydove Racing 120 GB SSD with who-knows-what NAND flash chips.

 

I'm not a professional drive reviewer but I did try to be as consistent as possible. I am I weirdo who benchmarks pretty much every single storage device I end up owning. This "mini hobby" started when one of my SanDisk Class 10 SD cards is causing my DSLR to stop recording randomly, finding out that its write speed is nowhere near Class 10 and more like Class 6. Testing all my storage devices also help me install the appropriate storage device for the appropriate systems as well as catch bull---- that manufacturers pull.

 

Feel free to comment down below with your thoughts and criticisms.

 

Edited December 29, 2022 by EJ_Tech
Removed a picture that I'm sure I removed earlier

[Jurrunio]

51 minutes ago, EJ_Tech said:

I'm pretty sure the WD Blue SATA SSDs are supposed to have a DRAM cache with the WD Green being DRAM-less.

They changed that ever since they start using numbers in SSD names. Now WD Red is the one with DRAM while Blue doesn't.

 

I myself don't like their HMB for the masses approach, RAM is not cheap these days and it's not like they're giving customers discounts for not getting on-SSD DRAM.