Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Disk drives are no doubt a bottleneck for data transfer, so it's always best to go the route that reduces potential bottlenecks whenever possible. I've posted a screenshot of a benchmark showing results for this NVME SSD, on an ASUS ROG Strix X570-e motherboard w/Ryzen 7 3700X CPU. The WD Blue SN550 does hit its performance specs for sequential read operations. Real-world performance however is only marginally better on a NVME compared to a standard SATA SSD drive. It's definitely not the pronounced difference you'd see between a mechanical HDD and a SSD, especially considering the RAM caching and other technology that has been incorporated into newer SATA SSD drives that boost their performance. The benchmark screenshot shows ridiculous high read/write MB/sec rates for sequential read/write. However, check those bottom numbers for random read/write (which is closer to real-world, rather than testing a bunch of standard disk I/O operations). Those numbers aren't too much higher than what you'd see when a SATA SSD is benchmarked. If you're expecting your Windows 10 (or Mac OS) boot times to be noticeably faster on NVME compared to booting on a standard SATA SSD, you'll be somewhat disappointed. While you may shave a few seconds off OS and loading of some apps, the overall performance improvement is only marginally better for NVME (vs SSD). If you're building a new PC however and want the best possible performance out of your OS boot drive, NVME is a good choice and it's not much more expensive than a SATA SSD. If you're considering NVME as an upgrade from SATA SSD, the performance gain is not quite substantial enough to make upgrading to NVME worth your time and effort. Overall the WD Blue SN550 is priced very well and it does perform to specs. If you're looking for a speedy boot drive, especially on a newer motherboard that has built-in M.2 NVME slots, this product is a good choice. If you're looking for large amounts of storage for media or for backup, a SATA SSD or mechanical HDD remains the better value.