One of our favorite SSDs is on sale at Amazon right now for its lowest price ever. The 500GB WD Blue 3D NAND is $90 today, which is about $17 cheaper than what it’s been in recent weeks and $30 off its listing price. It’s the cheapest this drive has ever sold for.
This is a standard SATA III 2.5-inch drive, which will fit into most laptops and desktops. In our tests, the drive was able to sustain a peppy 450MB/s speed during a long write test of 320GB. We reviewed the M.2 version of the WD Blue, but as it also uses a SATA III interface and not the speedier NVMe, we are essentially talking about the same drive in a different form factor. (The M.2 WD Blue 3D SSD is also on sale for $90 at Amazon if your laptop prefers gumsticks to traditional drives.)
The drive has an expected mean time to failure of 1.75 million hours, or up to 500 terabytes of data written to the disk. As we noted in our review that’s about 10 years worth of writes for the average user, and WD’s life estimates tend to be fairly conservative. Don’t worry about its reliability
While the WD Blue isn’t our absolute favorite SSD for most people—that honor goes to the $120 Samsung 860 EVO—it’s the runner-up, and at $90 for 500GB it’s well worth the price. If, however, $90 is too steep for you there’s also a 120GB Kingston SSD selling for the ridiculously low price of $28 right now.
[Today’s deal: 500GB WD Blue 3D NAND SSD for $90 on Amazon.]