WD Blue SN5000 4TB NVMe SSD review

4TB of solid-state storage – man, that’s a lot. Let’s face it, when it comes to file sizes, the gaming world is not slowing down at all. With resolutions and frame rates constantly rising and some of the best 4K monitors available today at, let’s call it “reasonably priced,” this escalate isn’t terribly surprising. Even with DLSS, FSR, and other forms of AI upscaling, the need to utilize HD textures to compensate for these extra pixels continues to escalate game install sizes.

Of course, this puts an extra strain on your system resources, especially if you prefer to keep the latest AAA files rather than doing the ancient random downloads and deletions every few weeks. In this case, a larger SSD is a must, and if you’re using a gaming drive as a secondary storage solution, then 4TB is a tempting assumption. But the thing is, we’re not looking into 4TB options at the moment, so where do we even start? Well, that’s where Western Digital believes it will find a utilize for its latest Blue SN5000 PCIe 4.0 SSD.

But wait, that’s a little weird.

The Blue SN5000 is an entry-level PCIe 4.0 SSD. It is built on the single-sided M.2 2280 format and is available in capacities from 500 GB up to 4 TB. This kind of skirts the affordability limits of US$280 for this capacity; However, it is not without flaws, and the biggest of them is the competition at the 4 TB level.

There’s a lot to unpack here. It is a standard QLC NAND drive equipped with 162-layer BiCS6 flash memory from Kioxia combined with a Polaris 3 controller from Sandisk. There’s no DRAM cache or anything like that, and everything is housed on one side of the flash drive, which will likely give it broad compatibility with laptops, consoles, and other smaller devices. The 4TB variant I have here comes with two flash packs, each containing a 2TB flash stick.

QLC is often touted as the budget option when it comes to SSDs; it is much easier to produce and usually easier to stack, making it a cheaper option. That said, it doesn’t really compete with TLC NAND solutions – which is what you’d expect from the best SSDs on the market. Combine that with the lack of cache and nothing can really compensate for the pitfalls of QLC. At least on the surface.

In testing, these QLC clichés unfortunately hold up well, although to be fair to Western Digital, it’s by no means touting this thing as groundbreaking, beyond a little confusion about AI storage management (because, of course). WD pegs this speed at around 5.5 GB/s for sequential reads and 5.0 GB/s for sequential writes, and that’s what Crystal Disk Mark reports. 4K random performance also clocks in at a solid 80MB/s read and 297MB/s write, while 3D Mark storage also delivers a comfortable overall score of 2860, with 493.95 in SSD throughput and 63ns access time. This is all pretty decent for an entry-level 4.0 drive.

Compare it to something like Crucial’s P310 (admittedly an M.2 2230 Small Form Factor drive), Lexar’s NM790 drive, or better yet, the Kingston Fury Renegade, and those numbers seem a bit lackluster, though. Each of these drives performs significantly better in everything from sequential tests to 3D Mark and random 4K performance. The only exception is our Final Fantasy

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Remember that the more concerning issue is temperature. During benchmark tests, the WD Blue SN5000 drive reached a crazy temperature of 81°C. Honestly, it’s a massive drive; it has 16 NAND flash dies in each package for a total of 32 dies, but compare that to something like the 2TB P310 (which should also be great considering the smaller form factor) which maxed out at 68°C, and even some of our rapid PCIe 5.0 drives (Seagate FireCuda 540 managed 83 and Crucial T700 87 C) and well, it sure gets scorching. It’s not like it wasn’t cooled like other drives, it was under a huge Asus ROG Strix X870E-E M.2 heatsink which should be more than enough to keep those temperatures at bay.

Overall, with this capacity, the SN5000 is a 4TB SSD at a reasonable price. Rather.

You can definitely save money by investing in higher capacity drives like this, that’s for sure, and yes, the 5000 recorded wins while loading Final Fantasy, so there’s that. However, it’s still $15-$20 more costly than some alternative models available at 4,000GB. Kingston’s Fury Renegade, Lexar’s NM790, Acer’s Predator GM7000, and Corsair’s MP600 LPX are less costly than the WD Blue SN5000 drives, and they all outperform them as well. All are equipped with TLC NAND; they have better controllers, lower temperatures, faster sequences, and better performance at random 4K resolution (although the NM790 may deviate slightly from this), and that’s the problem. This is OK; would I recommend you buy it? If it’s on sale, yes, but otherwise? All right…