WD Black SN750 1TB SSD With Heatsink Review

WD Black SN750 1TB SSD With Heatsink Review It is time for us to take a look at another drive from Western Digital and this time we're going premium. The WD Black series is the best the company has to offer us consumers and it's no different with the SN750. I have the 1TB version with EK heatsink on the test bench today. WD Black SN750 NVMe SSD When it comes to Western Digital, black is synonym with the best they have. It has been that way with their mechanical hard drives and it is the same with new SSDs. The new Black SN750 NVMe SSD delivers some of the best results possible from a single drive and packs plenty of capacity. I have the 1TB model in the office today, but it is also available in 500GB and 2TB versions. There is another choice to make when it comes to the SN750 and that's whether you want it with a heatsink or without. The one without also comes in a 250GB version. Whether you pick a WD Black SN750 with or without a heatsink, you get a great drive. It is a standard M.2 2280 drive which will fit most systems. It's targeted at desktops, but the version without the heatsink will also work well in notebooks. Of course, the system will need an empty M.2 slot and the ability to run this PCIe 3.0 x4 drive. On the inside, it utilises 64-layer 3D NAND which offers performance as well as cost efficiency. Performance and Endurance While the performance varies a little bit by capacity, all the WD Black SN750 offer great results. The overall fastest of them is the 1TB model which I have in the office today. I comes in at sequential speeds of up to 3,470MB/s and writes up to 3,000MB/s. The random performance is rated at 515K IOPS when reading and 560K when writing. As for the other capacity options, you can check out the slight variations in the specification chart further down. Endurance is at least as important as performance and naturally the WD Black SN750 has that too. It comes with a MTBF rating of 1.75 million houirs and it is backed by a 5-year warranty. The TBW rating comes in at 600TB per 1TB capacity. Heatsink, Do We Need It? There really is no short answer to the question whether we need a heatsink on a M.2 drive or not. But it is great to have and there are several reasons why. NVMe drives, especially the controllers, get quite warm. They have to handle a lot of calculations to keep up the performance and that generates heat. Now this won't damage the drives, but it will throttle them. And that is on purpose. Instead of risking hardware damage, the drives automatically slow down when they get too hot. A heatsink can prevent that from happening in the first place, no matter how hard your tax your drive. Environmental temperature is also something to consider here. M.2 drives are located in the centre of your system, between all the hottest parts. Bad airflow due to the amount of hardware in the area is another reason why things get hot here. Having a heatsink on the drive suddenly doesn't seem like a cracy idea anymore, does it? Some newer motherboards have built-in heatsinks, in which case you might want to go for the bare module instead. But do use a heatsink if you value your drive and want the best out of it. Creating a heatsink is easy, at least in basics. Everyone with the ability to read up on thermal dynamics can figure it out. But there's more too it if you want the best. That's probably why Western Digital partnered with EK Water-Blocks for the SN750 heatsink. Software Software isn't necessary for any drive to work, but you can gain some extras by utilising what's available. Almost any SSD manufacturer also have their software. Western Digital created an exclusive dashboard for the WD Black SSD. It features a sleek design and features such as the gaming mode. Feature Highlights Transfer speeds up to 3,470MB/s Capacity options of up to 2TBOptions with and without heatsinkFueled by Western Digital in-house controller and 3D NANDDownloadable WD SSD Dashboard with gaming mode5-Year Warranty Specifications The specifications are valid at the time of this review, but might be subject to changes in possible revisions of the product. Changes are rare, but can happen. Want to know more? Then you could visit the official product page which you can find by clicking here. Package and Accessories Western Digital created a more beautiful boxart for this Black SN750 drive, which is very fitting for a beautiful drive. The front has a picture of the SSD along with basic drive information. That includes capacity and peak performance. The rear side has a little more information, a full straight image of the drive, and a small window in which you can see the serial sticker of the actual drive. The insides of the package isn't just your ordinary hard-plastic either. There is a nice foam insert which holds the drive and accessories. Speaking of accessories, there aren't a whole lot. The only thing besides the drive is the note in case you need warranty or support. A Closer Look With an M.2 drive being what it is, it's rarely needed to have a page like this with a closer look at the drives. However, Western Digital's WD Black SN750 deserves it. The heatsink is made up of two parts which enclose the drive on both sides, delivering the best cooling possible. As you an see on the photo below, EK used screws to put it together which makes it easier to take apart again. However, these are T4 screws and you might not have a screwdriver small enough. The top part of the heatsink has a fin design to increase the surface. A larger surface is able to dissipate the heat better. The bottom is just smooth. After all, it will only face the motherboard or add-in card anyway. Here we have a little comparison against the previous version of the WD Black NVMe SSD. The drives are very similar in specs, but the SN750 is better. Just in case you wondered. However, the photo does show us the difference between the physical sizes with and without a heatsink. Once we take the heatsink apart, we see the actual drive along with the 2-piece heatsink. I didn't dare pull it out of the bottom part of the heatsink out of fear of damage. We can still see everything we need to see. That also includes the SanDisk branded controller and NAND which all belong to Western Digital now. The DRAM used is from SK Hynix. The Software Western Digital SSD Dashboard is a pretty simple and straight forward application. The first page offers details on your drive, from temperature over connection to utilisation. You'll find a real-time performance monitor on the second page. The third page is most likely the one you're interested in when opening up this application. Here yo ucan check on the firmware version and upgrade if if needed, erase the drive, check SMART details, as well as basic drive and system details. The settings page allows you to upgrade the software and set whether it should launch along with your system or not. The last page is where you'll want to go if you run into trouble with your drive. You can get direct links to various support sections and generate drive status reports here. The sidebar contains information about other WD drives, which some might find annoying. But there's a great bonus at the bottom with links to drive-related windows settings. This includes the Disk Management, System Properties, and Device Manager. Testing & Methodology In a bid to make our testing as thorough and as accurate as possible, we have devised a testing methodology that will give us the maximum amount of data. While this means that testing each drive will take considerably longer – easily up 36 hours – the overall picture that we can gather is bigger too. It helps both you as the reader and us as the reviewer’s to gain a clearer view of the drive’s overall performance, strengths, and weaknesses. It also provides a more accurate analysis of how each drive performs under different conditions. Data Fillage There are many ways to test a storage drive, and we have chosen to include close to every test possible. We will start with a typical benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various village scenarios. However, depending on how a drive is built, the performance may differ depending on how much data it is already storing. Testing this, the drive will be tested empty as well as with 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage. For these tests, we will be using Anvil’s Storage Utilities, AS SSD Benchmark, ATTO Benchmark, and CrystalDiskMark. Application and Gaming Besides these synthetic fill tests, the drive is tested with PCMark 8’s storage benchmark to get real-world performance results. Plain Drive Performance Following the fillage tests, the partition gets removed, and we check the drive’s raw performance. These tests will determine the hardware’s capabilities while eliminating any interference from the set file system. AIDA64’s storage benchmark and IOmeter are both great tools for this, and they help us paint an even clearer picture of the drive. The IOmeter tests I run are quite different from the rest as they will give a final result after a longer performance test rather than a maximum or average score; this gives us yet another view of the tested drive over the regular tests. Drive Conditioning Durability is a vital factor when it comes to NAND-based drives as the chips only can be rewritten so many times before they’ll stop working properly. Modern SSDs come with wear-level algorithms to increase the lifetime and reduce this factor as much as possible. We also take this into consideration in our reviews even tho it would take years to simulate this under real-world conditions. Luckily, Anvil’s Storage Utilities comes with an endurance test that can perform this action much faster, but it is still a time-consuming process. Depending on the hardware, this can easily take several days, and we write thousands and thousands of small files in various sizes and compressibility to drive over and over. Following this conditioning process, all of the previous benchmarks will be run again in the same scenarios and the same order. This will give us a great view of how a drive will perform after prolonged usage, and that is a very vital factor when you pick out your storage drive. The Preparation and In Between The drive will be formatted as NTFS with default settings, as most users will do. The quick format option isn’t used as that might affect the performance the first time data is written. Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn’t something to worry about for regular users. However, for these reviews, I will add a waiting period between each benchmark to make sure that the TRIM command has been fully executed and finished. After all, we want a clear picture of the drive’s performance with minimal interference from the operating system. On each page that follows with the benchmark results, I have inserted result screenshots from the benchmarks, created drive analysis chart for the fill-level performance, and added drive comparison charts where possible. Hardware Supermicro C7Z270-PG Intel Core i7-7700KCrucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400MHz (4x8GB)Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB SSDbe quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 (1200W)Noctua NH-D15SCooler Master HAF XB EVO with Noctua NF-A14 FLX fans Software AIDA64 Storage Benchmark Anvil's Storage UtilitiesAS SSD BenchmarkATTO BenchmarkCrystalDiskMarkIOMeterPCMark 8 Storage BenchmarkWindows 10 AIDA64 Storage Benchmark AIDA64 is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users with a broad range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. The app has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives and is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also has a disk benchmark tool, and that is the one I’ll be using. Fresh Drive The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives us a view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access Time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Conditioned Drive The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives us a view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Drive Analysis Anvil's Storage Benchmark Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a complete benchmark solution used to test any writeable storage drive. It also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to deliver days, months, and potentially even years of use in a shorter period. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive’s consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. AS SSD Storage Benchmark The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD, and they aren’t using the operating system cache. The copy tests are cached and as such not viable results at this time. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive’s consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. ATTO Disk Benchmark The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customise your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive’s consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD and SSD benchmark utility that allows you to measure a drive’s sequential and random performance. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive’s consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. IOmeter IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterisation tool for single and clustered systems. As a benchmark and troubleshooting tool, it is configurable to replicate the behaviour of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS. Sequential Tests Random Tests Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark PCMark 8 Storage benchmark tests the performance of SSDs, HDDs, and SSHD hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of games. You can test any recognised storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. Heatsink vs Without Since it was so easy for me to remove the heatsink from this drive, it's obvious to test and see if there's any difference with it mounted or not. For this test, I fire up a random workload with which I hammer the drive for 20 minutes non-stop. While that's going on, I'll watch the drive temperatures in order to see how high they go. I have a pretty good ventilated system without high-end graphics card, so its easy for the drive to keep up with things in my setup. Without the heatsink, the drive came in at 53 degrees Celcius and 490K IOPS. As comparison, with the heatsink attached, the drive only reached 47 degrees and delivered 500K IOPS. While the differences aren't big, they're there. And the hotter your system runs, the more difference it'll make. Pricing and Final Thoughts At the time of this review, Western Digital's WD Black SN750 with 1TB capacity and heatsink can be yours for just $269.99 or £254.01. Without the heatsink, the price comes in at $227.99 or £199.49 for 1TB of WD Black SN750 goodness. Final Thoughts I might as well say it right away, what an amazing drive! Western Digital went all out with the new WD Black SN750. It delivers great, stable, and lasting performance as a base. That's what we want from any drive. But it also looks epic while doing so. The EK heatsink gives the drive an aggressive look, but without being intrusive. It stands out and blends in at the same time. Other than that, there really isn't a lot to say. After all, it's a drive. Nothing negative to point my finger at. Just a great drive that does what it promises. Should I Purchase One? Do you need a new NVMe drive? Do you want one of the best on the market? Do you want a great looking drive too? If you can answer yes to those questions, then the WD Black SN750 is the perfect drive for you. Pros Great Performance Good looking with its heatsink (also available without)Up to 2TB capacityGreat endurance and stability5-year warranty Cons Not having one! "The WD Black SN750 by Western Digital is one of the most impressive NVMe drives you can get at this time. Performance, yes. Endurance, yes. Great looks, yes." Thank you, Western Digital, for providing us with this sample.