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NAS and storage

Western Digital Blue

7owners with an opinion
67%of verdicts positive
2/1positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability; criticized for durability.

What people wrote

Likes it
> Has anyone examined its use as an OS volume, compared to today's leading SSD's? Late last year I switched from a 1.5tb Optane 905P to a 4tb WD Blue SN5000 NVMe drive in a gaming machine and saw improved load times, which makes sense given the read and write speeds are ~double. No observable difference otherwise. I'm sure that's not the use case you were looking for. I could probably tease out the difference in latency with benchmarks but that's not how I use the computer.
Doesn’t like it
I was a system builder from 1990 onward. Seagate's 10. and 11. lines were notorious for going bad. I have stacks of bad Seagate drives from those days (2010s, iirc). For 3.5 inch form factor models, Seagate drives were dying at a rate of 10x all other brands combined. The earliest HDD scandal I recall was when Seagate bough Conner, just as Conner's run of leaky-seals started eating platters. Seagate refused to honor those warranties for years. Something eventually changed. IDK what, I always assumed a court was involved. For non-Seagate drives: I did have a bunch of 500GB WD Blue SSDs die a couple of years back. I replaced some under warranty; I later found a firmware update restored the rest of them.
Doesn’t like it
The firmware “fix” sounds suspiciously similar to their handling of a similar issue on the WD Blue SA510 SSD’s, of which I’m on my third, after the previous two failed in less than 12 months. Didn’t they start using some new 3D NAND chips? I wonder if there’s a flaw in those chips. They would be in use on many different products so may explain the similar failures?
Doesn’t like it
Samsung drives have been fairly bulletproof, even among their budget offerings. I've recently had an unexpected run of failing WD Blue SSDs and just had a new Sandisk drive (not one from gparent) fail, right after I backed another drive up to it.
Likes it
I still have one of those hacked WD blues. Always served me very well though I no longer have a 360. It serves out its live now as a 320 gb even though it's a 500 because I couldn't find a working 500 firmware at the time and I couldn't manage to get the original firmware back. But it's ok, I'm mainly doing ssd these days anyway.
Likes it
Still, with modern NVMe SSD speeds, usually the network will be the bottleneck. My system with a budget WD Blue gets a decent 1800MB/s sequential write (which somehow caused Win10 to freeze and my taskbar to disappear for a few seconds :/ ) and 2600MB/s sequential read, so even if everything else is unoptimized and the file has to be copied it will still take <1s for your hypothetical 1GB file. Copying the file over a 1Gb network link will take an order of magnitude longer.