Hello! I’ve submitted this directly to support, but I was hoping to get some possible alternative suggestions - or, at least, maybe warn others of a potential issue with this drive. I am currently using this SSD for storage and noticing that the write speeds for it are wildly inconsistent and well below the advertised 520 MB/s sequential write speed. I am not using it as my primary hard drive. It is primarily for storing games, so it has very little or no activity on it at most times. However, when transferring data to the drive, unlike my other SSDs, it constantly reports 100% utilization in the Task Manager (even when downloading files from the internet, which should be way under the write speed of the drive), and the write speeds swing wildly up and down. The read speeds appear to be fine. I have updated it to the newest current firmware via WD dashboard, and tested switching which SATA port and cable it is plugged into, which have not made any difference. I’ve attached an example screenshot of the task manager while doing a sequential write of 8GB onto this drive. You can see how the speeds swing up to 250 MB/s at first, then down to half that, then as low as about 35 MB/s, then back up to half, and so on. Compare this to one of my other SSDs (second screenshot) which ramps up to about 250 MB/s and then holds mostly steady. A S.M.A.R.T. short diagnostic reports no problems. (The extended test never finishes past 20% on this drive.) Could this possibly be a hardware issue, or maybe a configuration issue? I would appreciate any suggestions.
WD Blue SA510 transfer speeds from task manager:
Compared to a SanDisk drive (tried switching the cables between these two, same results regardless):
