WD Black Vs Blue NVMe (Comparison + Differences)

It can be extremely frustrating whenever your computer stutters, lags or refuses to load. Your gaming experience will be made or broken by the quality of your PC’s hard disc. Since hard drives are a thing of the past, SSD drives are faster, more dependable, and always deliver the best possible performance. Let’s start with WD Black Vs Blue NVMe!

Anyone who has previously used an SSD can attest to the fact that you will see a significant increase in your system’s speed, durability, and overall performance. Your PC will boot up faster, execute programs more smoothly, and load in record time.

WD Black Vs Blue NVMe

The WD Blue series is a beautiful alternative for casual gaming and everyday computing. It can be an excellent backup drive if all you want to do is keep your file stored. On the other hand, WD Black will provide you with far better performance.

WD Black should be a terrific addition to your toolbox if you’re looking to create a powerful gaming PC or use graphic design applications that demands a lot of performance. A 5-year limited warranty is also included.

Speeding up your computer using an SSD will make a huge difference in how quickly it loads because its transfer speeds are normally far faster than those on HDDs. This should eliminate any hiccups or problems when playing open-world games, which is a significant improvement.

When it comes to SSDs, it’s no surprise that some of the most popular devices in the market are rather expensive. With Western Digital’s solid-state drives, you’ll be able to enjoy a better gaming experience at a lower cost and with better performance.

Western Digital (WD)

The game-changing innovations of Western Digital have put the company at the forefront of the technology and computing industries. As a global brand, this multidimensional storage organization wants to empower you to create, store, and view digital information on various platforms and devices.

It’s no secret that Western Digital is a major player in the world of storage, hard drives, and SSDs. Since they provide so many HDD and SSD drives, choosing the one you can trust is not easy. There are a wide variety of drives from Red, Blue, Black, Gold, Green, and Purple.

To avoid taking up the entire day, we’ll focus on two of Western Digital’s most popular drives: the WD Blue and the WD Black. So, let’s break it down into the specifics and characteristics of these two before we put them up against one other and see how they stack up against each other.

WD Black PCIe SSD Specifications And Features

However, not all solid-state disks (SSDs) are created equal. Today’s most premium SSDs use high-speed PCI Express (PCIe) connectivity to connect directly to your computer’s motherboard rather than the legacy SATA bus.

If you’re looking for the fastest PCIe SSDs, go no farther than the M.2 cards, which employ the same four lanes of bandwidth as the larger M.2 cards but are much smaller. You can buy the WD Black PCIe SSD on any motherboard with an M.2 slot. Installation requires only a screwdriver, and there are no cords to contend with.

Users who are willing to spend money to make a difference are the target audience for this SSD. You may anticipate paying roughly 50% more for the WD Black PCIe than the WD Blue – whether that’s worth it is totally up to you.

According to the manufacturer’s specifications, the sequential read and write speeds are 2050 Mb/s and 800 Mb/s. According to WD, when CrystalDiskMark is used with a queue depth of 32, the SSD controller is saturated to provide the most accurate results.

Figures such as these don’t always reflect the reality of the situation on the field. It has a maximum endurance of 160TBW, which means that you can write 160TB of data to the drive over its lifetime without experiencing any degradation in the flash memory. This is in line with what Samsung and other high-end manufacturers offer, for five years.

WD Blue SSD Specifications And Features

WD’s Blue SSD brand of SATA SSDs is available in 2.5-inch and M.2 form sizes for mainstream users. Keep in mind that M.2 slots can accommodate either PCIe or SATA devices, so while the WD Blue may seem identical to the WD Black PCIe SSD, its performance will be vastly different.

In reality, WD doesn’t distinguish in its spec sheet or pricing between its 2.5-inch and M.2 Blue SSDs. Because the M.2 version is identical, there is no advantage to purchasing it. Pay carefully to the connection edge of the M.2 SSD you’re purchasing, and you’ll notice that the WD Black PCIe has just one notch, while the WD Blue has two. The second notch indicates that this module has been developed differently.

The WD Blue 3D, which debuted at Computer this year as the world’s first consumer drive to employ 64-layer NAND, is no longer available. Instead, we have the immediately preceding Blue SSD, which utilizes planar TLC flash memory.

Everything we’ve seen so far indicates that its performance will be pretty close to that of the 2.5-inch model. The WD Blue comes in three different storage capacities: 500GB, 250GB, and 1TB.

The 250GB variant has sequential read and writes speeds of 540MBps and 500MBps, respectively (the 500GB and 1TB models are slightly faster). With an endurance rating of 100TBW, this drive should last for 100 full fills before showing any indications of degradation. On the other hand, the warranty is only good for three years.

WD Black PCIe And WD Blue SSD Performance

To compare the performance of the two SSDs, we used the same test rig, which was built around an Intel Core i7-6700K CPU, a Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7 motherboard, 2x8GB of Kingston HyperX DDR4-2666 RAM, and an AMD APU with the latest drivers installed.

Both drives were set up in less than a minute. To access the M.2 slot, you may have to remove a graphics card depending on the arrangement of your motherboard, but installing an SSD and tightening one screw only takes a few seconds.

The WD Black PCIe SSD’s 476.81GB, formatted storage for our 512GB review unit, was shown by Windows. CrystalDiskMark gave us sequential read speeds of 1957MBps and sequential write speeds of 839.9MBps, which are only a hair shy of what WD claims. For random reads and writes, SiSOFT SANDRA delivered 1.43GBps and 818.93MBps, respectively.

On the other hand, the WD Blue SSD scored 560.9MBps and 532.7MBps in CrystalDiskMark for sequential read and wrote, which is somewhat faster than the advertised speeds from WD. The 2.5-inch version of the identical drive achieves 558.2MBps and 524.9MBps, respectively, to these results.

We got 495.89MBps random reads and 487.28 random writes from SiSOFT SANDRA. This is a tremendous improvement for anyone who is used to a rotating hard disc. While we appreciate that WD provides a free tool named SSD Dashboard on their website, we’d prefer to see it marketed on the boxes more prominently.

In addition to monitoring your hard drive’s health and working temperature, this software provides a visual representation of how much space you’ve used. You can also check the drive’s performance statistics, conduct a secure erase (WD Black only), and upgrade the drive’s firmware.

Is WD Black Faster Than Blue?

Yes, in terms of performance, WD Black is superior to WD Blue. WD Blue’s sustained transfer speed ranges from 147 to 180 MB/s, while WD Black’s ranges from 202 to 227 MB/s.

Is WD Black Better For Gaming?

For intense PC applications, such as accounting, video editing, rendering, and gaming, the WD Black Drive is best. A SATA SSD or an NVMe SSD drive may be a better option for many of these uses. For simple computing, the Western Digital Blue Drive Series is ideal.

Conclusion

Now concluding WD Black Vs Blue NVMe. Those who have previously worked with a spinning hard disc will notice a significant performance boost with an SSD. Booting, shutting down, and resuming your PC will take less time, and programs will quickly load. The cost of SSDs is still high, but you have a wide range of options in terms of capacity and performance.

The Blue SSD From WD is ideal for casual users in terms of speed and price. The Black PCIe SSD is a step up for those who can afford it, but it’s still reasonably priced. However, WD does not have a product that can compete with Samsung’s 960 PRO or Kingston’s KC1000.

Frequently Asked Questions