Western Digital Black SN750 1TB NVMe M.2 Review

Conclusion

The first Western Digital Black NVMe M.2 drive we tested wowed us with a level of performance up there with the best of them, and the refined SN750 continues this trend at a much lower price point.

Whenever you’re looking through the results from storage benchmarks it is tempting to only look at the headline sequential numbers but, particularly as an OS drive, the ability to read and write smaller blocks makes a massive difference to the responsiveness of your system. So often manufacturers commit to a big sequential read speed for attention grabbing advertising, but a well rounded drive will always be the better choice in the real world. Think of how often your OS is having to access a config file, or a DLL, or a new sound effect, and on the write side how often it needs to dump a temporary change to a document, or update a save file, or store your workspace. That happens significantly more often than the times you’re pulling a 4K movie or other large file off of it.

That’s where the SN750 shines. It might not have the gaudy read speeds of some premium models we’ve tested, but it’s extremely solid in every scenario and the refinements to the write speed ability and IOPS rate are certain to be appreciated by anyone who uses the entire capabilities of their rig rather than just plays games. We’ve said since the first solid state drives appeared that the difference they make to the responsiveness of your system is about the biggest upgrade you can make. That’s with SATA 3Gbps drives. NVMe M.2 drives are another quantum leap forwards and now, with the low pricing of the SN750, if you’ve got an empty M.2 port on your motherboard and haven’t yet moved into the NVMe world then this boost to performance is within your grasp.

Very early M.2 drives suffered from reduced performance when they got hot, and whilst that is still the case for any M.2 drive around, the manufacturers have noted it and greatly improved the heat spreaders to ensure that only the most airflow-starved case is likely to invoke thermal throttling on your drive. Even if that sounds like your system, the Western Digital Black SN750 is available with a seriously meaty heatsink to help dissipate any warmth and keep it running in tip top condition at all times. If, like so many of us, you have a motherboard that has a dedicated heat spreader built in to the chipset cooler section then the enlarged heat spreader on the standard version will still improve matters.

With a choice of capacities and designs and a more rounded performance profile than its predecessor, the Western Digital Black SN750 is a very tempting proposition, made more so by the seriously competitive pricing when compared to its competitors. If you’ve yet to dip your toes into the NVMe waters you could do much worse than this and it wins our OC3D Performance Award.

  

Discuss the Western Digital Black SN750 on the OC3D Forums.