WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD Review

by

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.

Speed, Speed, Speed, we all want our PC’s to perform top notch and hit the highest speeds when possible.  You’ve got the fastest RAM, Processor, Video card, SSD… wait do you really have the fastest?  What if I told you it’s not the fastest anymore, what if I told you there was something more that wouldn’t leave your wallet empty?  Well, you might have come to the right place for that update.  Today’s review is of the WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD.

Is this the fastest SSD around… well I am not sure just yet but we will find out soon enough.

Sleek sexy looking box, but it is just a box after all.  What is inside might be a little more interesting, but before we get inside, let’s check out the specifications.

  • Capacity: 1 Terabyte
  • Model Number: WDS100T3X0C-00SJG0
  • Interface: PCIe NVMe Gen3 x 4 Lanes
  • Form Factor: M.2 2280
  • Firmware: 102000WD
  • NVMe Standard 1.3
  • Controller: Pin House 3D NAND Controller
  • Flash Memory Type: SanDisk BiCS 3 64-layer TLC packages
  • Sequential read: up to 3,470 MB/s
  • Sequential Write: up to 3,000 MB/s
  • Random Read IOP’s: up to 515K
  • Random Write IOP’s: up to 560K
  • Mean time to Failure (MTTF): 1.75 Million hours
  • Endurance Rating 600TBW (Terabytes written)
  • 5 Year limited warranty

OK, now that we are done with that, let’s check out the unboxing so that we can see what is inside.

Pretty simple little package, nothing much to it…. Which is good, because I want to get on this now.

OK, let’s look a little closer at this.

Continue: WD Black 1TB PCIe SSD Close up

[nextpage title=”WD Black 1TB PCIe SSD Close up”]

Here is the drive again.  First off, we can see that it a 1TB drive, then we can see the model name and model number, as well as the serial number, date of manufacture, voltage and amperage.  A few other things too, but nothing too important.

At the very end of the drive, we find the a 512MB SanDisk BiCS 3 64-layer TLC package

Right above that, we find a 1024MB DDR4-2666Mhz IC of Hynix cache.

Then we find the SanDisk 20-82-007011 controller, well it seems that we now know what the inhouse built controller is now, being that Western Digital bought SanDisk in 2016.  Wonder why they wanted to keep that under wraps?

In speaking with Western Digital regarding this I come to find that their new vertically integrated SSD platform was engineered from the ground up, specifically architected to help maximize performance for NVMe SSDs, with advanced power management, durability and endurance for the growing range of applications benefiting from NVMe technology.

Hmmm, we will find out soon enough though if that is hype or the real deal.

On the other end of the chip, the side nearest the M.2 slot itself, we find the other 512MB SanDisk BiCS 3 64-layer TLC package for a total of 1GB of cache, NICE.

On the flip side, nothing but traces and empty space an a QR code I could not get anything from, must be an internal code.

Alright, now that we have those details down, let’s move on to the next chapter, on How to install and configure the WD Black SN850 1TB NVMe M.2 PCI-e SSD.

Continue: How to install and configure the WD Black SN750 1TB M.2 PCI-e SSD

[nextpage title=”How to install and configure the WD Black SN750 1TB M.2 PCI-e SSD”]

I have been building PC’s since I was 13, but this was back in the time before the internet was really wide spread so I had no guidance.  I learned through trial and error, expensive trial and error at that.  In this chapter though, I hope to help those that might not know how to install an M.2 drives and help you gain your own confidence.

In this video, I show you guys how to install the WD Black SN750 1TB M.2 PCI-e SSD.

Where you saw me install the M.2 SSD was directly under the PCI-e slot where the video card goes, where you would think it gets really hot.  The EVGA Z390 Dark motherboard brings 2 thermal pads, but for the purposes of this review I did not install them so that we can see just how hot the card gets.

With the EVGA RTX 2080 XC Ultra Gaming video card installed, I circled where the WD Black would be, yeah directly under a very hot spot.  I will go into the temps a little later in this review.

Before we can test temps though, we need to install Windows 10 on it, so in this video, I will show you how to install Windows 10 onto the WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD.

Pretty simple right and VERY quick but if you have never done it before, I completely understand how it can be scary, but hopefully I have helped.

So not every would want to install Windows 10 on it, you might want to use it as a storage drive, and don’t worry I will go over that now.

To set it up as a secondary drive, you would still want to review the first video on where we installed the drive onto the motherboard.  The pictures below are not using this drive, but the method is the same.

First, right click on the Start button on the bottom left hand corner and click “Disk Management”.

I have a few drives, but towards the bottom you will see Disk 0, Disk 1, Disk 2 and Disk 3.  Notice that Disk 0, 1 and 3 all state that have information on them, and also state that they have some partition, to make it easy also they are lined in blue.

The legend on the bottom left hand corner also provides that information.

The 3rd drive, Disk 2 has a black line over it and reads “Unallocated” which means there are no partitions and no data written on it, its blank.  Let’s fix that.

Right click on the “Unallocated” space and you will see a drop down as shown above, click “New Simple Volume”

Once you do, you will start the “New Simple Volume Wizard”, just click “Next” here.

On this second screen, if you want to make multiple partitions, you will want to change the size you are making this partition (size of the drive) but if want to use the entire drive as one partition, just click “Next”

Here you can choose the drive letter you would like this partition to become, then click “Next”

On this screen, you can choose the partitions, Allocation unit size, Volume label, if you would like to quick format it and/or enable file and folder compression.

For Windows, you are mostly going to want to be using NTFS as the file system.  Allocation unit size, it is probably safe to keep the default size unless you want to get down to specifics with the block sizes and tweaking performance to a grain of salt.  Volume Label is the name of the drive, in this example I will name it “GAMES”.

Perform a quick format will take seconds to format the drive to appear as a blank drive so you can fill it up, if you uncheck it, you will be waiting for hours for this drive to get formatted/cleared.

“Enable file and folder compression” is a horrible trade off option.  In essence, you will save space (not sure exactly how much) by having your data compressed all of the time and when the data is needed, it will need to decompressed before it can become fully utilizable.  Because of the speed of today’s CPU’s, the time is little to nothing, you may not notice it but still, I never touch this option.

When you are done reading all of this, you can click “Next”

Once you click “Next” the process begins formatting/clearing your drive getting it ready for use.  This takes only a few seconds but while this is occurring, you can click “Finish”.

When you are done, your “Disk Management” screen will look something like this, with all blue stripes.

Now if you open up “Computer”, you will find your newly formatted drive.  I circled it above, remember I named it “GAMES”.  She’s all yours but now let’s move on to the performance.

For performance, I will be benchmarking 4 drives in total, of course the WD Black SN750 1TB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD being one of them.  Let’s move on to the next chapter, Benchmarking and comparing the WD SN750 1TB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD.

Continue: Benchmarking and comparing the WD SN750 1TB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD

[nextpage title=”Benchmarking and comparing the WD SN750 1TB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD”]

In this section, we will compare 4 different drives, the WD black 500GB PCIe SSD, Samsung EVO 850 500GB, Patriot Scorch 256GB PCIe 3.0×2 NVMe M.2 SSD and of course the WD Black SN750 1TB PCIe M.2 SSD.

I will be providing scores I have obtained in tested these drives and comparing them discussing the performance within the results.

Before I get into the numbers, I will provide system specs so that you can compare with your own specs.

To help level the playing field is turning off Windows write-cache buffer flushing.  I will show you below how I did it in case you would like to do it, but with a warning.  Doing this raises the potential for corrupting data on your drives if there is a power outage while you are using your system or if you have an error and you have to manually restart your computer (but pressing the reset button on the case or holding down the power button to shut it off).  Just a warning.

 

If you are interested in disabling this, if anything just for testing, right click on the start button in Windows 10, then select “Device Manager”.  In the device manager, click to expand “Disk drivers” then right click on the drive you want to disable this on and click “Properties”.

 

When you are on the drives Properties, click on the “Policies” tab and place a check in the box reading “Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device and click OK.  You may need to restart your computer for this to be fully disabled, then that’s it.

For testing, we will be using 5 pieces of software, ATTO Disk Benchmark, Boot Racer, CrystalDiskMark, HWMonitor and Western Digital’s own SSD Dashboard.  I will mention why I had to use the Dashboard later in this review.

ATTO Disk Benchmark is used to help measure storage system performance, these tests performed are measured by transfer sizes and lengths for reads and write speeds.

This is the definition of what I state in my first sentence of this review, SPEED, SPEED, SPEED!  This is mind blowingly fast.

It’s pretty obvious that the performance of the SN750 is fast, but breaking it down a bit we can see here it more than doubled the speeds in Read of the WD Black 512GB, its older relative (I reviewed this drive back in March of 2017, you can read it here, but please remember the tests in that review were on a different board), the fastest of this review as you can see.

It also almost performed 4 times faster than the WD Black 512GB’s Write performance.  So that’s 117.33% faster in Write speeds and 66.67% faster in Reads, simply amazing.

Dropping down to the Scorch, which is actually a great drive for the price, it was 2.13 times faster in 64MB Read and over 4 times faster in 64MB Read.  121.20% faster in Writes and 72.23% faster in Reads.

We can see that it dominated in all results, but dropping down to 256KB Read and Write, we can see it was only 1.6 times faster in Read than the WD Black 512GB and 1.7 times faster than the Patriot Scorch in Read.  In write, it was 3.61 times faster than the WD Black 512GB and 4.60 times faster than the Patriot Scorch.  113.19% in writes and 44.86% faster in reads than the WD Black 512GB and 128.63% in writes and 51.32% faster than the Patriot Scorch.

I have not forgotten about the Samsung 850 EVO, it did its thing but we can see that the SATA Port is being phased out like the IDE port in performance.  The Samsung came in 5.57 times slower in Write and 6.21 time slower in Read on the 64MB transfer tests.  On the 256KB Write, it came in 5.57 times slower and 4.99 times slower in Read speeds.  I don’t think SATA will be going away soon, being that there are far more SATA ports than there are M.2 ports, but it’s taking a back seat.

Another thing to note on the Scorch is that it is a x2 drive, meaning it will take up 2 PCIe lanes were as both the WD drives will take 4 lanes.  Patriot did this for costing purposes, so it is a great drive, but cannot keep up with the SN750, but it matches pretty well with the WD Black 512GB.

Ok, so now let’s see what Crystal Disk Mark shows.

Crystal Disk Mark uses Microsoft’s own DiskSpd test to calculate its results.  DiskSpd is a load storage generator and performance test tool from the Windows Server and Cloud Server infrastructure Engineering teams.

OK, this one is a little more eye opening on the performance differences.

We can see here the Sequential Read of Q32TI (Multi Queues & Threads) on the WD SN750 was 61.70% faster than the WD Black 512GB and 76.91% faster than the Patriot Scorch.  In writes, the SN750 came in at 111.05% faster than the Patriot Scorch and 114.80% faster than the WD Black 512GB, so the Scorch actually did come in faster than the 512GB variant of the WD, but still second to the SN750.

In the 4KiB Q8T8 (8 Queues/threads Rea/Writes). The SN750 came in only 74.52% faster than the WD Black 512GB and 76.35% faster than the Scorch.  In writes, the SN750 came up ahead 122.36% faster than the WD Black 512GB and 89.40% faster than the Scorch.  You can see how the Scorch and the WD Black 512GB trade off of reads and writes often.

Finally, on the Q4KiB Q1T1 (1 Queue & 1 thread) the SN750 took a smaller lead in Read performance coming in at only 5.41% faster than the WD Black 512GB and 31.37% faster than the Patriot Scorch.  Here though, the 3rd place spot was not held by the Scorch, it was held by the Samsung 850 EVO coming in 20.91% slower than the SN750.

In Writes, the SN750 again took the lead by 32.13% over the WD Black 512GB and 32.63% over the Scorch.  The Samsung 850 EVO again surprised but not by hitting the 3rd spot, but by hitting the second spot at only 30.46% slower than the SN750.

It is a bit sad that they were competing against the 2n place spot, but against this SN750, 2nd was considered 1st place because there was no competition.

Speed being speed, I wanted to explain what each of these oddly worded sequences are.

  • 4KIB Q1T1 is the random read or write of a 4KB block with single queue and thread
  • 4KiB Q8T8 is the random read or write of a 4KB block with multi queues (8) and threads (8)
  • Seq Q32T1 is Sequential Read or Write of multi queues and threads
  • 4KiB Q32T1 is the random read or write of a 4KB block with multi queues (32) and threads (1)

Windows assumes that files and memory are handled in 4 kilobyte chunks, meaning that all transfers from a drive to memory are 4 kilobytes in size.

A queue, is a set of instructions, 1 queue is one set of instructions and multi queue or multiple queues are multiple sets of instructions or data and they are processed in order.  A thread, manages the queues processing their data, a thread handles 1 queue, multiple threads handle multiple queues to process data efficiently.

The one most pay attention to is the Seq Q32T1, as this is the reading that drive manufactures publish and are usually held accountable for.

Aside from performance, there is a 3rd factor we will be testing and that’s boot speed and these might be a little surprising.  For this I will be using BootRacer by Greatis Software.

Here we can see that from a completely powered down status, this drives boots into Windows at 10 seconds but does not reach a perfectly idle state until 14 seconds for a total of 24.468 seconds.  Let’s compare with the other drives.

Did you see what happened here… The SN750 was dethroned, dethroned by none other than its sibling the WD Black 512GB, not by much but a win is a win.  Then in an interesting turn of events, the Samsung 850 EVO landed it self in 2nd place again, but above the SN750 coming in at a total boot time of 24.39, that’s .078 seconds faster than the SN750… I am disappointed in you SN750… no, not really haha.

So the very last test was temperature, being underneath the video card, things can get a bit hot so I wanted to see just how hot but Western Digital has a kind of unfair advantage here and I will explain why.

While the Patriot Scorch and the WD Black 512gig are 1.2 NVMe spec drives, the WD SN750 is an NVMe 1.3 spec drive and that could potentially mean a lot.

The 1.3 spec or standard can deliver many different power states and in each of those powerstates a maximum power draw, latency and with those performance.  The standard also provides thermal management that can be controlled by the vendor, in this case Western Digital.  The Thermal management controls the throttling, which means that when it get’s too hot the performance will drop to protect itself rather than melting the drive and damaging many other components.

I will use HWmonitor to provide you the temperatures the other drives hit, but for this drive, I have to use the WD SSD Dashboard of which I will go over in depth in a moment.

As you saw before, here is where the SSD is, directly underneath the video card.

Things can get pretty toasty on a video card and with the SSD being right there, it is a bit scary, but WD has you covered.  To test the temperatures, I ran a pass of CrystalDiskMark and immediately when it finished ran ATTO.  ATTO pushes the drives but I wanted to prime the drives and get them hot with CrystalDiskMark and then bring that heat and push it further in ATOO.

Here are the results read from HWMonitor and the WD SSD Dashboard.

Here are the temperatures of the Samsung 850 EVO 500GB, Patriot Scorch and WD Black 512GB.

Then here we can see the WD Black SN750.  The hottest both of the WD drives got was 70°C which were the fastest drive.  After that was the Patriot Scorch coming in at 66°C and then the coolest drive was the Samsung 850 EVO 500Gig but that’s not an M.2 drive so it’s different.

I had to use the WD SSD Dashboard tool since HWmonitor was not reading the drive, it saw it but did not read the name of the temperature at all keeping the temperature at 32°C.  To give you an example.

See what I mean?

Now that we have gone over the performance of the drive, let’s jump on over the software this drive unlocks for you.

As I have already mentioned, you can download the WD SSD Dashboard, which has a host of features, let’s go over them now.

The first one in the WD SSD Dashboard is the Status pane.  Here you can see the capacity of the drive, the volumes of the drive (if you partition it you will see more, here you only see the C drive and the partition Windows creates), Life remaining of the drive (very handy), temperature of the drive, the Interface speed which does not seem to work.

Prior to testing, I checked for a firmware update, sadly there was none for this drive.

Actually, looking into this as I was writing the review, I saw the Western Digital Black 512GB had an update, so I flash it.

After flashing it, it took me to this page in the older-style Dashboard look and I find that this drive has 96% life remaining, an almost 2-year-old drive, that is pretty impressive.  The update only took about 10 seconds.

Let’s check out performance.

Performance, shows you a performance chart.  As you use the drive you can watch the transfer speeds in megabytes and transfer IOP’s as well.  You have a shortcut as well to the Windows Performance Monitor.  What tool’s does it offer?

Under tools, we are able to check and update for a newer firmware for the drive.

We can erase the drive by prepping a thumb drives to be able to boot to it and the erase the drive in the mode.

We then have diagnostics utilizing S.M.A.R.T (Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) which is utilized in most drives and has been around for a very long time, but this actually lets you run test rather than just ready results later when/if your drive is failing.

It provides you with Drive details

As well as system details.  So what is under Settings?

Under Settings, we can update this application itself and chose windows startup options.

I also checked for application updates, none either.  What’s under Help?

Under Help, we can see online resources, generate reports, perhaps in case something goes wrong you can send to Western Digital and then information about the SSD.

If you noticed, on all of the pages on the bottom right, Western Digital provided shortcuts to Windows Disk Management, Windows System Properties and Windows Device manager and a few more also.

Also on all pages, but on the top, Western Digital provides this information… and a switch, a Gaming Mode switch.  I was interested on this switch and I come to find that it lowers the latency of the drive and increases the max power to the drive, but I thought the NVMe 1.3 Standard did that too?  It looks like WD tapped into that resource.

I tested originally with it off and then I tested with it On but sadly there was little to no difference, actually some of the scores dropped, but only a very tiny bit.  One thing that did happen though is the temperatures did go up, but again not by much.

I tested again with the same method I used before and the drive only hit 72°C, only 2 degrees hotter than before.  This is an acceptable temperature but it did not provide any sort of improvement in speeds, so it’s kinda worthless.

I asked Western Digital about this, as the spoke to me previously on other questions I had but I could not get an answer on this as they were prepping for PAX East 2019 (I can’t believe I missed it this year).  If I do get some answers on this, I will surely let you all know in the results page.

That’s about it for WD SSD Dashboard, but you can also download “Acronis True Image WD Edition” which is free since you own this drive.  So let’s check that out.

Within Acronis, on the “Backup” tab, you can backup your entire PC and then select the destination.

The “Archive”, “Dashboard” and “Sync” tabs will get you to this screen.

And if you click the “Get Now” tab, you will be greeted with this screen where you can buy the full version for only $30 dollars, I don’t really backup my machine, but if you do this would be great for you.  You can find a copy of the 2019 Edition here on Amazon: https://geni.us/phPBQ4C

The “Tools” tab provides you with some nice features.  “Clone Disk, allows you to clone your Operating system disk to another disk, or any disk to any disk, this feature is included in this build.

The “Add New Disk” is pretty useful.  It lets you partition your new drive to use it in Windows.

The “Rescue Media Builder” allows you to create a bootable rescue disk and WinPE functions for better compatibility.  While the Acronis bootable rescue media function is enabled in this version, the WinPE based media is not.

Acronis Universal Restore that allows you to recover your media to a different type of machine (different HAL) with a different type of CPU (AMD vs Intel) but this feature is not available in this free version.

More Tools throws you out to File Explorer where you can fine shortcuts to all of the tools.

Help, well helps you use all of this software if you don’t know how to.

Very simple software and very useful in my opinion, I would not use the backup portion of it but the clone feature is nice for me at least.

With all of this out of the way, I think it’s time to wrap this review up with my Final Thoughts and Conclusion.

Continue: Final Thoughts and Conclusion

[nextpage title=”Final Thoughts and Conclusion”]

When I received the WD Black 512GB, I thought this drive is going to blow everything away, and for the most part it did, so I did not expect too much from this drive but I was completely wrong.  Before I get more into it, let’s check out my review overview.

In the video, I kind of went over everything I did here in the review but some people prefer video over text.  Now let’s go over the pros and cons and see if you agree.

Pros

  • No drivers required (WD SSD Dashboard and Acronis are opt
  • Affordable considering capacity comparatively
  • Blazing Fast
  • Nice warranty, 5 years
  • Keep relatively cool without heatpads or heatsink
  • Exceeds Rated Specs

Cons

  • Ummm… I really tried here but… now you have to throw away your regular SSD’s… are maybe use them as a backup drive?

Sell lot’s of things in your house cluttering space, you HAVE to get this drive.  I cannot say anything bad about it.  It keeps itself cool, it blows away its rated speeds (which feels like no one else does) and competing drives in it’s price range and above.  Can you imaging RAIDing these, the performance would be amazing x2.

[P_REVIEW post_id=1084171 visual=’full’]

 

Congratulations Western Digital, you received a 10 out of 10 Editors Choice for this amazing drive.

Currently it is $249.99 and while that is not cheap by any means, it is on par with pricing to similar models and speeds, one thing we can say is that it will only get more cost effective overtime.  If you don’t need a 1TB drive, you want smaller or bigger you have options here, they also sell a 250GB variant $78.56 on Amazon, a 500Gig variant $129.99 on Amazon, a 2TB variant for those of you that need a little extra space which is $500 on Amazon of course aside from this 1TB variant.

Back to: Intro

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.