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Targeted at gamers, the SN750 is WD's third generation Black NVMe drive. The SN750 uses the same NAND/controller combination as the previous generation Black NVMe drive, but with updated firmware to push up the performance. is it a good SSD to be considering for a new system build in 2019?
The new drive is available in three capacities; 250GB, 500GB and 1TB (the drive we are reviewing here). Coming along very shortly will be another version of the drive with a stylish EKWB solid aluminium heatsink. This version of the drive will also bring with it a larger 2TB model.
The SN750 uses the same combination of WD's own in-house NVMe controller and SanDisk’s 64-layer BiCS 3D TLC NAND that the previous Black NVMe drive used but with some firmware updates to get some grunt out of the drive.
WD quote Sequential read performance for the 1TB SN750 at up to 3,470MB/s which is 70MB/s faster than the previous drive but the writes get a healthy 200MB/s kick up from the previous drives 2,8000MB/s to 3,000MB/s. Random 4K performance is quoted as up to 515,000 IOPS for reads and up to 560,000 IOPS for writes which again is faster than the previous model, 15,000 IOPS for reads and a massive 160,000 IOPS for writes.
The endurance for the 1TB drive is stated as 600TBW and WD back the drive with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 1TB
NAND Components: 64-layer 3D TLC NAND
NAND Controller: WD
Cache: 1GB SK Hynix DDR4
Interface: PCIe Gen 3 x4.
Form Factor: M.2 2280.
Dimensions: 22 x 80 x 2.3mm
Drive Weight: 7.5g
Firmware Version: 102000WD
With the SN750, WD have introduced new branding for the Black NVMe series. The drive comes in a smallish box with a clear image of the drive on the front. WD is obviously keen to let you know that this is a fast drive, too, as the 3,470MB/s Sequential read figure is displayed in the bottom right corner of the box. The drives capacity is displayed in the upper right hand corner.
The rear of the box has a small clear plastic panel through which part of the drive is visible, sitting in its protective plastic enclosure. To the right of this panel is another image of the drive while to the left of it is that Sequential read figure again, along with icons displaying the fact it uses 3D NAND and that it comes with a 5 year warranty. The only other thing in the box is a Technical Support and Warranty Guide.
WD’s Black SN750 is a single sided PCB design, so the rear of the drive is empty, with all the components covered by the product label on the top side.
The 1TB SN750 uses a pair of SanDisk 256Gb die, 64-Layer 3D TLC NAND packages. Joining these on the single sided design are the in-house controller and a 1GB SK Hynix DDR4 cache IC.
With the SN750, WD have given their SSD Dashboard management utility a neat and impressive facelift. Not only does it look better than the old version, it also includes a gaming mode which if enabled reduces latency by disabling the low power modes via the firmware.
The Dashboard allows you to monitor drive status, performance, perform secure erases (currently only by making a bootable USB device), update firmware and monitor temperatures. There’s no cloning tool integrated into the utility but you can download Acronis True Image WD Edition from the WD website.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
Intel Core i7-7700K with 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an Asus Prime Z270-A motherboard.
Other drives
Corsair Force MP500 480GB
Corsair Force MP510 960GB
Intel Optane SSD900P 480GB
Intel Optane SSD905P 480GB
Intel SSD760p 512GB
Kingston A1000 480GB
Plextor M9Pe(Y) 512GB
Plextor M8PeG 512GB
PNY CS2030 240GB
Samsung SSD970 EVO 2TB
Samsung SSD970 PRO 1TB
Samsung SSD960 PRO 2TB
Samsung SSD960 EVO 1TB
Toshiba XG6 1TB
Toshiba OCZ RD400 512GB
Western Digital Black NVMe 1TB
Western Digital Black PCIe 512GB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark 3.5.
CrystalMark 6.0.
AS SSD 2.0.
IOMeter.
Futuremark PC Mark 8
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using v6.0.
In the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, the Black SN750 doesn't perform as well as the previous generation Black NVMe drive at either shallow (QD1) or deep (QD32) queue depths.
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 customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.
Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
WD's official Sequential speed ratings for the 1TB drive are up to 3,470MB/s for reads and up to 3,000MB/s for writes. Both speeds are confirmed by the ATTO benchmark with the drive producing a read figure of 3,504MB/s with writes at 3,026MB/s under test conditions. That 3,504MB/s figure allows the drive to claim the top spot on the results graph from the previous WD Black NVMe drive.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
With the tougher AS SSD benchmark, the drive could only reach 3,054MB/s for Sequential reads with writes trailing in at 2,714MB/s. The overall read score of 2008 is a little shy of the read score of the previous WD Black NVMe drive but the write score of 2275 is much better than the previous drive's score of 2052.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable.
We test 128KB Sequential read and write and random read and write 4k tests. The test setup’s for the tests are listed below. Each is run five times.
128KB Sequential Read / Write.
Transfer Request Size: 128KB Span: 8GB Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test.
4K Sustained Random Read / Write.
Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Thread(s): 4, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test.
4K Random 70/30 mix Read/Write.
Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Reads: 70% Writes: 30% Thread(s): 4 Outstanding I/O: 2 – 32 Test Run: 20 minutes.
As with the ATTO benchmark results, we could confirm the official Sequential performance figures of the drive using our 128KB tests. The drive produced a read score of 3,496MB/s with writes at 3,024MB/s against the official 3,470MB/s reads and 3,000MB/s writes.
128KB Sequential Read Performance v QD
The read performance of the SN750 falls below the previous generation NVMe drive at QD2 but for QD's 1, 4 and 32 the new drive is the faster performer.
128KB Sequential Write Performance v QD
When it came to our Sequential write test, the new SN750 outshone the previous drive at all queue depths apart from QD1 where the older drive still has the advantage.
The official 4K random read figure for the 1TB SN750 is up to 515,000 IOPS. Under our tests the drive got nowhere near the official maximum figure. However the drive performs very smoothly as it climbs through the various queue depths.
When it comes to random reads, the SN750 trails the older WD Black NVMe drive in all of our tested queue depths.
In our random write tests the SN750 peaks at the QD16 mark at 335,910 IOPS still well short of the official 560,000 IOPS.
4K Random Write v QD Comparison
The previous WD Black NVMe drive beats the Black SN750 at QD1 when it comes to random writes, however this soon switches around as the queue depth deepens with the newer drive well out in front.
The drive displays very consistent performance in our 70/30 read/write mixed test.
In our throughput tests the read peak average throughput came at the 4MB block mark at 2,879MB/s before falling back a little to finish the test run at 2,798MB/s.
In our read throughput test the Black SN750 sits a little shy of the previous Black NVMe drive.
As with the read peak average throughput, the peak write score came at the 4MB block mark at 2,726MB/s, after which the performance dropped off rapidly to finish the test at 1,559MB/s.
When it comes to our write throughput test, there is nothing to separate the two NVMe based WD Black drives.
Futuremark’s PCMark 8 is a very good all round system benchmark but it’s Storage Consistency Test takes it to whole new level when testing SSD drives. It runs through four phases; Preconditioning, Degradation, Steady State, Recovery and finally Clean Up. During the Degradation, Steady State and Recovery phases it runs performance tests using the 10 software programs that form the backbone of PCMark 8; Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop Heavy and Photoshop Light, Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Battlefield 3 and World of Warcraft. With some 18 phases of testing, this test can take many hours to run.
Preconditioning
The drive is written sequentially through up to the reported capacity with random data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes. This is done twice.
Degradation
Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for 10 minutes. It then runs a performance test. These two actions are then repeated 8 times and on each pass the duration of random writes is increased by 5 minutes.
Steady State
Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for final duration achieved in degradation phase. A performance test is then run. These actions are then re-run five times.
Recovery
The drive is idled for 5 minutes. Then a performance test is run. These actions are then repeated five times.
Clean Up
The drive is written through sequentially up to the reported capacity with zero data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes.
In PCMark8's Consistency Test, the drive does pretty well overall. It does get hit pretty hard during some of the Degradation and SteadyState tests but the overall recovery of the drive is good if a little erratic.
PCMark8’s Consistency test provides a huge amount of performance data, so here we’ve looked a little closer at how the WD Black SN750 performs in each of the benchmarks test suites.
Adobe Creative Cloud
There's a huge peak in bandwidth as the drive enters the first SteadyState test run while running the Adobe Photoshop Heavy trace but it falls back again very quickly. The drive recovers pretty well if very erratically in both the Adobe Photoshop tests.
Microsoft Office
The drive doesn't handle any of the Microsoft office tests particularly well and the recovery is erratic too.
Casual Gaming
The drive handles the two casual gaming test traces very well with no sudden, dramatic dips in the test bandwidth for either test.
Just like the Consistency test, PCMark 8’s Standard Storage test also saves a large amount of performance data. The default test runs through the test suite of 10 applications three times. Here we show the total bandwidth performance for each of the individual test suites for the third and final benchmark run.
The drive produced strong bandwidth figures for each of the individual tests with the two Adobe Photoshop tests offering over 1GB/s of bandwidth.
We also recorded the total bandwidth result for the whole run of the PCMark8 Standard Storage test.
The Black SN750 produces 603.51MB/s as a bandwidth figure for the whole PCMark8 standard test, beating the 587.59MB/s of the previous Black NVMe drive.
For the long term performance stability test, we set the drive up to run a 20-minute 4K random test with a 30% write, 70% read split, at a Queue Depth of 256 over the entire disk. The 1TB WD Black SN750 averaged 83,472 IOPS for the test with a performance stability of 73.58%, which is very good for this class of drive.
To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.
100GB data file.
60GB iso image.
60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files).
10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of png, raw and jpeg images).
10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files).
5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
Although the drive had no problems with our suite of real life file transfer tests, it much prefers dealing with large files than small bity files as can be seen with the results for the 60GB Steam, 50GB File and 10GB Audio folders when compared against any of the other tests.
To get a better idea of what this drive can deliver in terms of real life transfer speeds, we took our SATA SSD drive out of the equation and instead tested the drive writing and reading files to and from another NVMe drive, in this case a 512GB Toshiba/OCZ RD400.
This gave us some spectacular results, particularly when it came to handling the large files in the 12GB Movie folder and the 5GB image.
WD's new Black SN750 uses the same 64-layer memory/ WD controller combination as the previous Black NVMe drive but with updated firmware to squeeze some more performance out of the drive.
With WD being one of the select group of SSD manufacturers that have all the major components of a drive under their own control, they are able to fine tune the firmware to get the best out of the drives components.
The standard SN750 comes in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities but arriving very soon will be another version of the drive fitted with a stylish EKWB solid aluminium heatsink. This version of the drive brings with it a larger 2TB flagship model.
WD quote Sequential read/write figures for drive of up to 3,470MB/s and 3,000MB/s respectively. We could confirm these figures with the ATTO benchmark, the tested drive producing a read score of 3,504MB/s with writes at 3,026MB/s. That ATTO read figure makes the SN750 the fastest consumer NVMe SSD we have tested to date. Incidentally, those official ratings for the SN750 are an improvement on the previous Black NVMe drive which was rated at up 3,400MB/s reads and up to 2,800MB/s for writes.
Random 4K performance is quoted as up to 515,000 IOPS for reads and up to 560,000 IOPS for writes which again is faster than the previous model, some 15,000 IOPS for reads and a massive 160,000 IOPS improvement for writes. However under our tests we couldn't get close to those maximum figures, the best we saw was 326,381 IOPS for reads and 335,910 IOPS for writes.
With the launch of the SN750 comes a very fancy refresh of WD's SSD Dashboard which now includes a Gaming Mode. When turned on, the firmware disables the power saving features that are incorporated into the drive allowing lower latencies and more performance. The one annoying aspect of this Gaming Mode is that you have to re-start the system to enable/disable it.
For the launch of the new drive and to re-enforce its gaming use, WD have re-vamped the branding of the Black SSD range with restyled labelling and product packaging designs.
We found the WD Black 1TB SN750 available buy from Overclockers for £219.95 (inc VAT) HERE
Pro
- Strong Sequential Performance.
- Updated SSD Dashboard software.
Cons
- The 4K performance was disappointing in some of the tests.
KitGuru says: There's nothing really new about WD's Black SN750 drive compared to the previous Black NVMe drive but with some updates to the firmware WD have got the new drive to perform better – particularly when it comes to Sequential performance.
