Western Digital 718037872339 2TB SATA III M.2 2280

The WD Red SA500 is a NAS-focused SATA SSD with excellent 1300 TBW endurance and a 5-year warranty. Speed is its weak spot at 560 MB/s, landing in the bottom quarter of our database. Worth it for always-on NAS use, but skip it for anything that needs fast load times.

Sequential reads top out at 560 MB/s with writes at 530 MB/s. That's the ceiling for SATA III, so the drive is doing what it can with the interface it's got. Random IOPS land at 95K read and 85K write, which puts it in the bottom quarter of our database for speed. The endurance story is much better. 1300 TBW means you can write over 700GB a day for five years before the warranty runs out. For a NAS drive that's the stat that actually matters.

Stacked against the Samsung 990 PRO, Crucial T700, or Kingston Fury Renegade, this drive gets demolished on speed. Those are PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 drives pushing thousands of MB/s. The WD Red SA500 doesn't even try to compete there. Where it holds its own is endurance. The 1300 TBW rating beats plenty of consumer NVMe drives that burn out faster under constant write loads. For a NAS cache drive or a boot disk that runs 24/7, the Red SA500 makes more sense than a blazing-fast gaming SSD that wasn't designed for that kind of abuse.

Pricing is all over the map. In the US you'll see it listed between USD 672 and USD 827, which is a wild spread for the same drive. Amazon has the better end of that range. European buyers get a tighter window at EUR 409 to EUR 450. Either way, you're paying a premium for the endurance rating and NAS certification. A 2TB NVMe drive with faster speeds often costs less. You're buying reliability, not raw performance, and that's a trade-off you need to be okay with.

The WD Red SA500 is a 2TB M.2 SATA SSD built for NAS boxes and always-on workloads. It's not chasing benchmark glory. It's built to sit in a hot, cramped enclosure and chew through writes for years without throwing a fit. The 1300 TBW endurance rating and 5-year warranty tell you exactly where Western Digital aimed this thing.

But here's the catch. It's a SATA drive in an NVMe world. 560 MB/s reads were fine in 2018, but they look glacial next to the PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 drives flooding the market. If you just need a reliable cache drive or a boot disk for a NAS, this is a solid pick. If you want speed, keep scrolling.

Skip this if you're building a gaming rig, a laptop, or anything where load times matter. The SATA III interface caps you at 560 MB/s, and you can get 2TB NVMe drives with 5-10x the speed for less money. Also skip it if you need a portable drive. The 15.4 portable score in our database is one of the worst we've seen for this category.

Buy this if you have a NAS with an M.2 SATA slot and you need a drive that won't die after a year of constant writes. It's a workhorse, not a racehorse. The endurance rating and warranty are the whole pitch. If you're building a gaming PC or a laptop, this is the wrong tool. You'll get more speed for less money with a decent NVMe drive.