Today we are taking a look at the WD Black SN750 500GB SSD. The “Black” line is WD’s gaming and enthusiast line of drives, and the SN750 is their PCIe 3.0 x4 model. It features a WD designed controller, onboard DRAM cache, and TLC NAND. We will be comparing this drive both to the other 500GB drives we have reviews in the past, as well as the WD Blue SN550 1TB drive from their more value-oriented line.
WD Black SN750 500GB Overview
The WD Black SN750 500TB comes in a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.
The PCB for the WD Black SN750 500GB is much more populated than on the Blue drive. Beneath the label is two NAND packages, the custom controller, and a DDR4 DRAM package. There is a total of 512GB of NAND present, which allows for a small 12GB reserved area. This is very common for consumer class drives.
The rear is completely barren. As a consumer drive, there is no power loss protection (PLP.) You can read a bit more about why PLP is important in some server workloads in our piece What is the ZFS ZIL SLOG and what makes a good one. That looks at a specific case but has a few diagrams and an explanation around what goes on with these drives when they do and do not have PLP.
WD Black SN750 500GB Specs
The WD Black line of TLC-based SSDs ranges from 250GB up to 2TB in size.
Our review unit is on the smaller end of the WD Black line, offering good but not top tier sequential read and write performance. 300 TBW endurance is pretty standard for a drive in this category, as is the 5-year warranty. As a smaller drive, we expect this drive to run into some performance limitations compared to the 1TB drives we have looked at in the past, particularly with write speeds, but only testing will tell us for sure.
CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD, and confirms we are operating at PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.3.
Test System Configuration
We are using the following configuration for this test:
- Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X570-P
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (6C/12T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the WD Black SN750 500GB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.
Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.
