Western Digital

Western Digital

Western Digital

Western Digital

Western Digital

Western Digital

Western Digital has begun shipping the WD Black SN750, the latest in its popular Black line of performance-oriented, solid-state hard drives. The company is also pivoting the Black brand to be primarily focused on gamers; this is part of an ongoing trend that high-end PC hardware is getting categorized as gamer gear.

Western Digital claims the newest entry will offer an option to help PC gamers reduce risk of throttling-related performance dips. That's thanks to an optional heatsink add-on, but the company also credits improved performance to firmware refinements. Other than that, the WD Black SN750 is a modest update over its predecessor. Anandtech benchmarked it and saw some performance improvements over the previous drive, but nothing dramatic—and what improvements were there were largely thanks to the firmware.

The SN750 still uses the same 64-layer 3D NAND we've seen before, while some competitors are introducing 96-layer 3D NAND products. Nevertheless, the SN750 remains an attractive option for performance-minded gamers because of its power efficiency, because of its more-than-good-enough performance, and because the prices are more attractive than they once were.

Here's a quick price rundown:

250GB: $79.99

500GB: $129.99

1TB: $249.99

2TB: $499.99

Note that the prices above are for the variants without heat sinks. Also, the 2TB model is new to the lineup and won't be available until later this spring—same goes for the heatsink-equipped models. The heatsink option will be available for all models except for the 250GB offering. Speeds also vary by capacity.

Here's what Western Digital tells us users can expect:

250GB 500GB 1TB 2TB Sequential Read (MB/s) 3,100 3,470 3,470 3,400 Sequential Write (MB/s) 1,600 2,600 3,000 2,900 Random Read (IOPS) 220K 420K 515K 480K Random Write (IOPS) 180K 380K 560K 550K Endurance (TBW) 200 300 600 1,200

In addition to performance-related firmware improvements (the new firmware is not rolling out to previous models by the way), Western Digital has overhauled the look and feel of the software for the SSDs "to align with the new brand identity"—so, basically it looks all gamer-y and dark now.

There's also a gamer mode in the software, and that's a little more interesting. Enabling it prevents the drive from going idle or going into low-power states, so it will remain responsive during gameplay. The thought is that sometimes the drive will not be accessed for a bit while playing a game, but then it will suddenly be needed again, so the new mode makes sure there's no latency after an idle period.

All non-heatsink-equipped capacities except for the 2TB one are shipping this month. The heatsink configurations and 2TB model are expected this spring.

Listing image by Western Digital