WD Green SN350 1TB NVMe SSD Review

Today we are taking a look at the WD Green SN350 1TB NVMe SSD. The Green line of SSDs lives at the bottom of WD’s product stack as their value entrant. Previously we have looked at WD’s mid-range Blue line as well as their high-end Black line, so it will be nice to round out the set with the Green.

WD Green SN350 1TB NVMe SSD

The WD Green SN350 1TB comes in a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.

The WD Green SN350 PCB layout is very similar to the Blue SN550. Both drives are DRAM-less, and they pair a single NAND package with a custom WD controller. The two drives diverge in the type of NAND; the SN350 1TB is based on QLC NAND rather than the TLC from the Blue line drives. Both the controller and NAND are produced in-house and branded as SanDisk.

The rear side of the drive has nothing except some silkscreened logos and regulatory markings.

WD Green SN350 SSD Specs

The WD Green SN350 line of SSDs is available in an odd trio of sizes; 960GB, 1TB, and 2TB. Here are the specs of each:

I say the sizes are odd because there is both a 960GB drive and a 1TB drive with vastly different specs. The 960GB drive is TLC-based, though is rated for lower performance and endurance. My 1TB review model is QLC based, along with the larger 2TB model. Rated performance specs on the two larger SN350 drives are respectable, with the 1TB at 3200 MB/s read and 2500 MB/s write.

Endurance on the entire WD Green SN350 line is uniformly terrible. The common endurance point for 1TB NVMe SSDs is in the 500-600TBW range, while the WD Green SN350 1TB is only rated at 100TBW. Worse still is the 2TB drive, which is also rated at 100TBW despite doubling in capacity. These drives are strictly for light duty only.

Lastly, the warranty is listed at 3 years, rather than the 5 years on the Blue and Black lines of drives we have previously reviewed.

CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD, and confirms we are operating at PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.4.

Test System Configuration

We are using the following configuration for this test:

• Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X570-P
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (12C/24T)
• RAM: 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 UDIMMs

Our testing uses the WD Green SN350 1TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.

Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.