Sandisk’s Blue Plate Special, A Homemade Controller Paired With QLC NAND, Hold The Cache
The Sandisk Blue, what was once a WD special, has always been the middle child. Not as impressive as the Black, but generally preferable to the Green it doesn’t get much love from many customers. The SSD Review checked out the 2TB model, though you can opt for a 4TB or a 500GB model. The 2TB is rated at 7100 MB/s read and 6700 MB/s sequential writes which is just about peak PCIe 4.0 performance and suggests this is not normal QLC NAND. The lifetime does suffer a bit, the 2TB offering 900TBW which is about what you would expect from QLC but also comes with a 5 year warranty which is quite impressive for a drive of this type.
The performance is much better than you would expect from QLC NAND and is more consistent than you would expect. This comes at a cost, and one which spoils the attractiveness of the WD Blue SN5100 for The SSD Review. The MSRP of the 2TB model is $150, which is similar to the faster WD Black SN850X or Samsung 990 Pro and higher than the SN7100. Here’s hoping that one problem gets fixed, otherwise this is a decent drive as evidenced here.