Announced at the same time as the standard Black SN750, WD's Black SN750 Heatsink model has only recently become available. Not only does it ship equipped with a stylish EKWB heatsink it also adds a 2TB flagship drive to the Black SN750 line-up. WD's Black SN750 Heatsink edition is available in three capacities; 500GB and 1TB (the drive we are reviewing here) and the flagship 2TB drive. There is no heatsink equipped version of the entry 250GB SN750. The Black 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. NVMe. Form Factor: M.2. Dimensions: 22 x 80 x 8.10mm. Drive Weight: 33.2g Firmware Version: 102000WD. With the SN750 family of drives, Western Digital have introduced new branding for the Black NVMe series. The drive arrives 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 is supported with a 5 year warranty. The only other thing in the box is a Technical Support and Warranty Guide. WD’s Black SN750 Heatsink edition is a single sided PCB design, so the rear of the drive is empty, with all the components covered by the EKWB heatsink. Under it sits a pair of SanDisk 256Gb die, 64-Layer 3D TLC NAND packages, the in-house WD controller and a 1GB SK Hynix DDR4 cache IC. The EKWB (EK Waterblocks) heatsink is, as you might expect from the Slovenian cooling specialists, well designed and constructed. The silver and black finished cooler uses 21 fins across the top section with an aluminium base plate. The cooler uses six small Hex screws (3 per side) to hold it together. As befitting WD's performance range, the WD Black SN750 uses the latest incarnation of WD's SSD Dashboard management utility which has had a pretty dramatic going over. 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 Crucial P1 1TB Intel Optane SSD900P 480GB Intel Optane SSD905P 480GB Intel SSD760p 512GB Kingston A1000 480GB Plextor M9Pe(Y) 512GB Plextor M8PeG 512GB Patriot Viper VPN100 1TB PNY CS2030 240GB Samsung SSD970 EVO 2TB Samsung SSD970 PRO 1TB Samsung SSD960 PRO 2TB Samsung SSD960 EVO 1TB Samsung SSD960 EVO Plus 1TB Toshiba XG6 1TB Toshiba OCZ RD400 512GB Western Digital Black SN750 1TB Western Digital Black NVMe 1TB Western Digital Black PCIe 512GB Software: Atto Disk Benchmark. 3.5. CrystalMark 6. 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. As with the standard version of the Black SN750, the Heatsink edition version of the drive doesn’t perform as well as the previous generation Black NVMe drive at either shallow (QD1) or deep (QD32) queue depths in the CrystalDiskMark benchmark. 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 3,019MB/s. 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 3,066MB/s for Sequential reads with writes trailing in at 2,678MB/s. The overall read and write scores of 2027 and 2304 respectively are a little better than the standard version of the SN750. 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. 128KB Sequential Performance In our 128KB Sequential tests, the review drive didn't perform quite as well as it did in the ATTO tests, with reads of 3,395.56MB/s and writes of 3,038.75MB/s. The read figure is a little shy of the official 3,470MB/s while the write figure is a little better than the official 3,000MB/s. 128KB Sequential Read Performance With the exception of the QD2 performance, our review sample Black SN750 Heatsink Edition trailed behind the standard drive in our Sequential read tests. 128KB Sequential Write Performance In a complete switch around to the Sequential read results in our tests, in the Sequential write test runs, the review drive outperformed the standard drive at all queue depths. 4K Random Read v QD Performance The official 4K random read figure for both versions of 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. 4K Random Read QD Performance The Heatsink Edition of the drive is a little faster than the standard drive at a QD of 1. However at QD's 2 & 4 it slips behind the standard SN750 before overtaking it again at a QD of 32. 4K Random Write v QD Performance In our random write tests the SN750 peaks at the QD2 mark at 330,583 IOPS still well short of the official 560,000 IOPS. 4K Random Write QD Performance In our 4K random write tests, the Heatsink version of the Black SN750 sits between the WD Black NVMe and the standard version of SN750 at QD1. At QD's 2 and 32 it overtakes both drives. 4K 70/30 Mixed Performance The drive displays very consistent performance in our 70/30 read/write mixed test. In our read throughput test, the drive peaked at the 8MB block mark at 2891.53MB/s, just slightly ahead of the standard Black SN750. When it came to the write throughput test, the drive's peak write speed came at the end of the test at 2798.43MB/s, again faster than the standard SN750. 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 very good and pretty consistent. PCMark 8’s Consistency test provides a huge amount of performance data, so here we’ve looked a little closer at how the WD SN750 Heatsink Edition performs in each of the benchmarks test suites. Adobe Creative Cloud The drive suffers during the rigours of the Degradation and Steady State phases of the Adobe C.C. test with all the test traces having problems with the exception of the After Effects trace. However the drive recovers well, particularly during the Photoshop Light and Heavy trace runs. Microsoft Office Although the drive doesn’t handle any of the Microsoft office tests particularly well it does recover from the ordeal pretty well. Casual Gaming Apart from the dramatic dip in the bandwidth in the World Of Warcraft test during the seventh Degradation run the drive handles the two casual gaming test traces very well. 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. Our review sample drive didn't handle the standard PCMark 8 Standard Storage test as well as the standard Black SN750, its bandwidth result of 551.36MB/s being some 52.15MB/s behind the standard 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 Heatsink edition averaged 68,900 IOPS for the test with a performance stability of 58.57%. 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. 21GB 8K Movie demos. 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files). 11GB 4K Raw Movie Clips (8 MP4V 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 measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSD's we use the same files but transfer to and from a 512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400. Taking the SATA based drive out of the equation produced some spectacular results, particularly when it came to handling the large files in the 12GB Movie, 4K and 8K folders and the 5GB image. To see if the EKWB heatsink offers any advantage over the standard Black SN750, we pushed both drives by running our performance stability test (a 4K random test with a 30% write, 70% read split, at a Queue Depth of 256 over the entire disk) and tracking the temperature as the test was running. As the results show, the EKWB heatsink works pretty well at keeping the drive cooler than the standard drive both at default settings and with the Gaming Mode enabled. The standard drive averages 73.09 °C during the run in standard mode and 73.66 °C with the Gaming Mode enabled. The heatsink equipped Black SN750 averages 63.74 °C in standard mode and 64.17 °C in the Gaming Mode. Although the 10 degree difference between the two versions of the drive might not be of any benefit in a conventional desktop, it's a usual saving if you are thinking of building a PC into the tight confines of a small form factor case. Just like the standard WD Black SN750, the Heaksink version of WD's latest flagship consumer NVMe SSD uses the same 64-layer memory/ WD controller combination as the previous Black NVMe drive but with updated and tweaked firmware to squeeze some more performance out of the drive. The heatsink in question is a sleek EKWB (EK Waterblocks) design. The silver and black finished cooler uses 21 fins across the top section with an aluminium base plate. The cooler uses six small Hex screws (3 per side) to hold it together. Naturally the addition of the heatsink has added to the SN750's height and weight. The heatsink adds around 6mm the height of the drive and some 25.5g to the weight. The heatsink works well, shaving around 10 °C of the maximum temperature of the standard drive during our Performance Stability test. That may sound a touch insignificant in a standard desktop but it's a useful saving if you are planning to use the drive in a compact PC build. At launch the standard Black SN750 was available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities but with the arrival of the Heatsink edition of the drive comes a new 2TB flagship drive for the range. That said there isn't a 250GB heatsink equipped model. The official Sequential read/write figures for drive are the same as the standard model; 3,470MB/s and 3,000MB/s respectively. When tested with the ATTO benchmark these figures were confirmed with the review drive producing a read figure of 3,504MB/s (identical to the standard 1TB Black SN750 drive) and 3,019MB/s for writes. That read figure of 3,504MB/s puts both Black SN750 drives just behind Samsung's SSD970 EVO Plus drive at the top of the ATTO results chart. Random 4K performance is quoted as up to 515,000 IOPS for reads and up to 560,000 IOPS for writes both of which are faster than the previous Black NVMe drive, 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 330,028 IOPS for reads and 330,583 IOPS for writes. The drive is supported by the refreshed WD SSD Dashboard management software 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. So the heatsink version looks good and performs very well but the fly in the ointment at the time of writing this review at least, is the pricing. Taking Overclockers UK pricing for the two drives as an example, the standard 1TB Black SN750 costs £219.95 while the new Heatsink equipped version is £269.99 - that's a lot extra for a heatsink no matter how well it works. The pricing of the new model needs some tinkering with, that's for sure. We found the WD Black 1TB SN750 Heatsink model at Overclockers UK for £269.99 (inc VAT) HERE Pros Overall performance. Well designed heatsink. Cons The 4K performance was disappointing in some of the tests. Heatsink adds on a chunk of cash over the standard drive. Kitguru says: The stylish EKWB heatsink does aid in keeping the drive cool and would be a useful ally in a compact PC build but its pricing could do with some adjusting.