Western Digital 1TB WD Red SA500 NAS 3D NAND Internal SSD - SATA III 6 Gb/s, 2.5/7mm, Up to 560 MB/s - WDS100T1R0A

Does the job as expected

2tb SATA M2. It works I cant complain

I bought two of these to hold the network-facing shared folders in my recently set up Synology NAS. I installed each as a basic drive, ext4 file system. The shared folders are backed up to much cheaper HDD storage with periodically scheduled tasks. The ext4 file system allows the drives to be removed and accessed on my RHEL system in an emergency. With the extreme endurance rating of these 2TB drives (1300 TBW), I expect not to think about them for a very long time.

Popped this into my NVR for use with my home security camera system. Works great and a noticeable speed upgrade from the HDD i was running previously. Will probably pick up a few more and RAID them! Only downside is it doesnt come with mounting screws, but this isnt a huge deal.

The disk is used as the second disk in the system (laptop) as information storage.

Cost a bit but it works

Nice but took long time to be shipped , maybe due to covid-19

Im using a number of WD Red SA500 4TB NAS drives in a ZFS pool consisting of 6 mirrored vdevs. Overall pool performance is great, though average single disk write speed observed during two resilvering operations is only around 200 MB/s. (Ive never seen it go above 380 MB/s.) Its not clear to me whether thats the sustained write speed of this drive or if theres a bottleneck (or deliberate throttling) elsewhere. As mentioned in the headline, its still early days - the pool has only been in operation for a few months. Within the last few days ZFS started showing checksum errors for one of the Samsung EVO 860s that are also in the pool. I replaced it with an SA500. Ill try to remember to update this review over time to note how the SA500s are faring. Update - 2020-09-17: I now have eight of these SSDs. No problems so far. Update - 2021-12-13: In May, 2021, my ZFS pool with eight of these drives (plus eight Samsung drives) faulted one of the SA500 SSDs due to write errors. I replaced it with another SA500. Earlier, back in July of 2020, one of the Samsung drives failed too; I replaced it with a SA500 (as it was cheaper at the time). So far, in that pool, Ive had two drive failures; one 4TB Samsung 860 EVO and one 4TB WD SA500. Im still running the pool with eight Samsung drives and eight WD drives, with no real preference aside from whichever is least expensive when I need a new one.

Let me state at the outset that I’m not a network guy, nor did I get this for NAS use. For those not really informed about what a NAS is or what is does, let me fill you in. NAS stands for Network Access Storage. For private and commercial applications where you want to be able to access data from multiple computers or devices, you’d generally use a NAS rig with multiple drives linked together for mass storage. This WD Red M.2 SSD is intended for NAS applications. That is, for network storage applications as opposed to as a general computer drive. It is specifically designed to allow for parallel data access (multiple users accessing it at once), as well as long term read/write reliability far beyond what a typical desktop SSD would require or expect. Both things are extremely useful in NAS storage applications. This drive is rated at about 350TB written (TBW) before it wears out and data won’t be written successfully on it any longer. Your average desktop SSD of the same size will be rated in the 120 to 200 TBW range. The 350TBW rating of this drive is quite a bit lower than some of the NAS drive offerings from Seagate, but at this price it’s not terrible. For consumer based use on a regular computer, 350TBW would take a decade or longer to reach. In other words, its reliability is wasted on consumer use. In my case, I got this drive because Vine offered it and because I had need for a SSD for use in one of my laptops. I never really had any intention to use it for NAS storage. In this application it’s probably not the best option, though it’s certainly capable. It’s not the fastest SSD you could get for consumer computer use and in a desktop application its other benefits won’t be utilized. It’s also more expensive than other better options designed for consumer PCs. But let’s say you do use it in a basic computer application. Over a regular mechanical magnetic storage drive, it’s still going to be loads faster. Your traditional 7200rpm magnetic storage mechanical drive transfers at about 120MB a second. This SSD has a practical transfer rate of about 600mb/s . That’s a significant boost and one that you’ll feel when trying to retrieve data, or if using as a boot drive, with how fast Windows boots and responds. In my own use, this was put into an 8 year old laptop with a 2nd generation i5. The laptop works quite well considering its age and the old CPU is perfectly capable of handling almost all basic computing tasks and internet browsing, but the hard drive on it was failing. A SSD to SATA enclosure later and it was installed. The laptop has new lease on life and has been used for school work and other things by my kids since then. The Laptop is far more responsive and snappy than it had been with the old SATA Mechanical drive… including compared to when it was new. Yeah, I suppose I’m wasting the drive on such a use. Bottom Line: I can’t give a rating on this drive for its intended purpose for NAS storage, but as far as being used as a consumer computer drive, it’s quick enough and reliable enough for my needs. I don’t doubt that in NAS applications it’ll function just as well.

I always purchase these WD Red because of the speed and durability.