The Western Digital SA500 is a solid-state drive in the 2.5" form factor, launched on October 31st, 2019. It is available in capacities ranging from 500 GB to 4 TB. This page reports specifications for the 1 TB variant. With the rest of the system, the Western Digital SA500 interfaces using a SATA 6 Gbps connection. The SSD controller is the 88SS1074 Dean from Marvell, a DRAM cache chip is available. Western Digital has installed 64-layer TLC NAND flash on the SA500, the flash chips are made by Toshiba. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are processed more quickly. The cache is sized at 10 GB. The SA500 is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 560 MB/s and 530 MB/s write; random IOPS reach up to 95K for reads and 85K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 143 USD. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Western Digital guarantees an endurance rating of 600 TBW, a typical value for consumer SSDs.