WD Blue 250GB SSD Linux Benchmarks

While I have owned many Western Digital hard drives over the years, last week was my first time trying out one of the company's new solid-state drives (SSDs) under Linux. Some Linux benchmark results to share for reference today are of the WD Blue 250GB (WDS250G1B0A) SATA 3.0 SSD.

The WD Blue SSD line-up currently comes in 250GB / 500GB / 1TB capacities and in M.2 or 2.5-inch drive form factors. The WDS250G1B0A is the 250GB SATA 3.0 2.5-inch model. This model is rated for sequential reads up to 540MB/s, sequential writes up to 500MB/s, random reads up to 97k IOPS, random writes up to 79k IOPS and an endurance of 100 TBW.

Western Digital backs their WD Blue SSDs with a three year warranty. From a technical perspective, the WD Blue SSD line-up isn't anything too exciting by modern SSDs and pretty much puts it in line with other SATA 3.0 solid-state drives from other vendors.

This 250GB SATA 3.0 SSD currently retails for $78 USD on Amazon.com.

For running some Linux benchmarks I compared the WD Blue 250GB SSD performance to the PNY CS1211 120GB, Toshiba/OCZ TR150 120GB, VisionTek 240GB SATA 3 SSD, Samsung 850 EVO 1200GB SSD. Then on the NVMe SSD front for reference was the Samsung 950 PRO 256GB, Samsung 960 EVO 256GB, and Intel 600p 256GB.



The FIO results put this WD Blue SSD on Ubuntu Linux as performing in line with the other consumer SATA 3.0 SSDs while of course the NVMe SSDs offer much better performance at a higher cost.


In some workloads the WD Blue SSD does outperform the other low-cost SSDs.

You can view more results via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. If you wish to compare your own Linux system's disk performance to the results in this article, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and then run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1612254-TA-WDSSD598276. More details on this SSD via the Amazon product page.