Western Digital Black SN750 1TB

WD respins its high-performance NVMe drive

- Jeremy laird

SOLID-STATE STORAGE isn’t exactly a recent innovation, but it has arguably taken some of the better-established names in general PC storage to get a grip on the SSD market. Take Western Digital. Long a leading maker of conventional magnetic hard drives, its early SSD output was patchy.

Its first effort at an NVMe drive, for instance, was underwhelming. Admittedly, a second-generation model appeared last year with much improved performance, but with this third-gen drive, can Western Digital go all the way to the top of the table? On paper, the new WD Black SN750 looks pretty promising.

Like last year’s update, the SN750 comes in M.2 format, has an in-house WD controller chipset, and utilizes 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory. To that WD has added refined firmware and a model, tested here, aimed at enthusiasts and gamers, and fitted with a hefty heat sink. In terms of the claimed specifications, the 1TB model offers marginal increases in sequential performance. Reads are up from 3,400MB/s to 3,470MB/s, while writes step up a little more, from 2,800MB/s to 3,000MB/s.