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 500 GB 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. 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 absorbed 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 IO reaches 95K IOPS for read and 85K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 83 USD. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Western Digital guarantees an endurance rating of 350 TBW, a typical value for consumer SSDs.