WD Red SN700 NAS NVMe SSD Review - Worth Your Cache?

Contents:

00:00 - Introduction, Why NAS Based SSDs?
07:45 - Unboxing
09:00 - Discussing the Specs
16:05 - PC Benchmarks
22:10 - Synology NAS Cache Tests
26:25 - QNAP Pool Tests
29:15 - Conclusion & Verdict

Why should you care about the WD Red SN700 SSD? It's a fair question. Western Digital (WD) has been in the SSD market for quite a few years now, with a lot of in-house R&D at their disposal and their past consolidation with Sandisk resulting in some generally impressive Solid State drives from the brand available to home/business users. One big plus to the WD range of SSD media (and indeed hard drive media) is their rather easy to follow colour coding system on their portfolio, with SSD/HDDs for NAS/SMB server use being branded with the 'WD Red' title. Although the WD Red range of NAS hard drives has been around for a long time and is available in numerous forms (RED, Red Pro, Red Plus), their SSD series has been a little more gradual in its release strategy, with their WD Red SA500 NAS SSD (in SATA 2.5" and SATA M.2) being the only real move from them. That is of course until now, with their new M.2 NVMe SSD for NAS/Server use, the WD Red SN700. With more and more NAS server systems (both desktop and rackmount) arriving on the scene with dedicated M.2 NVMe SSD slots (first real example as earlier as 2017/18 with the DS918+), WD has really taken their time of producing a dedicated NVMe SSD for NAS users. So, what is it that makes the WD Red SN700 SSD stand out? What makes it NAS/Server optimised and ultimately in our SN700 review we want to figure out if it deserves your cache*?

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[nascompares]

For those that need it, here is the chapters on this video.

00:00 - Introduction, Why NAS Based SSDs?
07:45 - Unboxing
09:00 - Discussing the Specs
16:05 - PC Benchmarks
22:10 - Synology NAS Cache Tests
26:25 - QNAP Pool Tests
29:15 - Conclusion & Verdict

[aznhomig]

I got some old SATA SSDs as read cache in my NAS but I do plan on picking up a pair of NVMEs for read/write cache once I wear out the SATA SSDs or there are good black Friday deals for these Nas-specific NVME SSDs, whichever comes first.

[Franc.Hauselmann]

I installed 2 brand new SN700s in my Synology DS1621xs+, and just 3 months later, my SSD’s estimated endurance has reached its limit. According to Synology support, these M.2 drives use a different method to gather endurance data compared to the models supported by Synology. This is why they are not on the compatibility list for the DS1621xs+. The cache stops working when the endurance limit is reached with Synology.

[trosnyak]

Need a recommendation for caching. I have 2x NVME installed in my DSM7. Should I enable read or read/write? I have 2x14tb HDD installed. Planning to install a 3rd one.

[andic]

Just bought a 500GB model for my Linux OS drive and to run my VM files ... Will I need to fit a heatsink?