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

29 May 2023: A review for two purchased: Western Digital 1TB WD Red SA500 NAS 3D NAND Internal SSD - SATA III 6 Gb/s, 2.5/7mm. Ive had them a couple of months. No problems. Got them to replace two Samsung 870EVOs that died in a little less than 2 years. Samsung has some real problems and it took over 3 months to get replacements under warranty from Samsung. Right after they failed, I switched to these Western Digitals because I have used WD drives since 1994 and in my little life in my little home WD drives have been stellar performers. I have to say that all my past experience with WD has been with spinning platters. I hope these solid state drives are also reliable. Breakneck speeds dont impress me much. I just love good performance for a long, long time. So...the RED line from WD is supposed to be exactly that--constant running over the long haul in devices. Yep. I hope that is true. WD, do it to me again. I need you.

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.

Plug and play. Using in a robust custom built computer running just Windows 10. Hosting movies to run on Plex server and streaming has been fast and flawless.

Please be aware that the Western Digital SA500 Red SSD is one of the very few non Enterprise SSDs that supports DRAT and HZAT that will allow trim to work properly behind a LSI SAS HBA. Search for ID: 1211161496937 or TRIM support for LSI HBAs and RAID controllers in the Broadcom knowledge base. Purchased six 2TB 2.5 drives and put them in a ZFS RAIDZ2 pool in a Supermicro chassis that supports 36 SAS/SATA drives behind a LSI 9300-8i SAS HBA controller. System was running Devuan (Debian) with kernel 4.9. Experienced issues with the drives being kicked out on a nightly basis. Upgraded the LSI 9300-8i controller to the latest BIOS and firmware. Drives where a lot more stable but they would still occasionally be kicked out once a week. Upgraded Devuan to the latest version which runs kernel 4.19 and still experienced the same issues. Only by running the back ported 5.4 kernel did problems go away and system has been stable for the last month. Performance is excellent and what you would expect a six drive RAIDZ2 (RAID6) with 32GB of ARC.. Overall Im happy, but it was a trying time getting to this point. Western Digital support was fairly poor. Essentially they said to contact the controller vendor to see if they can fix the problem. Broadcom (they bought LSI) was helpful but they did not provide the solution to the problem.

I pretty much only use WD Red these days and have them in every format, Ive been super happy with them so far.

Great price for a server NAS drive or for everyday use. This a better purchase than Samsung drives right now. I need to buy a couple more. I have found these drives work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. In linux use gparted to install the formatting software by: sudo apt install gparted Great drive. Buy a bunch.

I bought this to replace a Samsung 840 Pro as a cache drive in my FreeNAS build. So far everything is running as smooth as it did before. The temperature of the drive is a little warmer than the old drive. At idle, the old drive sat around 1°C over ambient, this one sits around 5°C over ambient.

Exactly what you would expect from a WD nvme drive. Hoping the red line has great always on longevity as this is now the OS drive in a home server.

Does the job, time will say if it deserve its RED name. Just Works

I plug this to my TESLA model 3 to record video, no issues.