Western Digital is gunning for creative professionals with the launch of its new WD Blue SN5000 NVMe SSD. This is one of the fastest drives in Western Digital’s portfolio, and it’s more than fast enough for 4K video editing and other intensive tasks.
TheSN5000features PCIe Gen4 transfer rates up to 5,500 MBps, making it one of the fastest SSDs in Western Digital’s portfolio. It features Western Digital nCache 4.0, a next-gen SLC caching technology that’s ideal for creative workloads, and it’s rated to endure 1,200TBW(although this is a fairly standard TBW rating for a high-capacity NVMe drive).
“Digital content creators captivate audiences across a multitude of platforms through engaging stories, visually stunning photos and high-quality videos. To keep up with the demand for premium content, they need substantial storage capacity as well as faster and more efficient workflows. As AI-enabled applications continue to generate larger media assets, high-performance and higher capacity data storage is increasingly becoming more essential.”
Western Digital also posits the SN5000 as a drive for “AI-enabled applications.” It claims that the drive is “strategically aligned” to Stages 4 and 6 of theAI Data Cycle—prompting and content generation. I’d argue that this is true of any fast NVMe drive with SLC caching. Still, Western Digital isn’t wrong. The SN5000 is a good option for modern creative workflows that involve large AI-generated files or local AI models.
Note that the SN5000 is one of many high-speed NVMe SSDs in Western Digital’s portfolio. It’s technically the “sequel” to theWD Blue SN580drive, offering many of the same features but with a 25% boost in speed and a wider selection of storage capacities. I think that most creatives would be perfectly happy with either the SN500 or its predecessor.
You can purchase the 4TBWD Blue SN5000 NVMe SSDtoday for $290. Though I’m compelled to point out that theWD_BLACK SN850X, which is the fastest NVMe drive sold by Western Digital, is currently on sale for $310. If I were in need of an ultra-fast NVMe drivetoday, I’d choose the SN850X, but the SN5000 will probably go on sale in a few months and may end up being the more attractive option.
