If you've been on Discord you probably know that I work with extreme performance enterprise grade NVM Express drives every day. I work for a company that makes some of the fastest drives you can get, if you're willing to drop several thousand dollars on one. I know SSDs pretty well from an enterprise prospective. Data transfer speeds isn't as important as those sweet sweet IOPs. IOPs are effectively how many requests a drive can perform in one second. In the enterprise world you want to be able to have a good balance of IOPs and transfer rates. The more IOPs, the more files you can access or write in any given second. Kind of like IPC but for storage.
Consumer grade storage isn't something I've really gotten into. For me if it has a pretty good transfer rate and the IOPs is fair then it's fine, I'm gaming and doing normie work at home. Western Digital really excited me when I saw they had produced a consumer grade drive with enterprise grade IOPs and a HUGE cache to really slam out the write speeds. WD provided me with a sample of the SN750 Heatsink so I could take a look and see what I thought. What do I think? WD has really created an extremely fast drive with a great price to boot, sounds like a good match for us AMD users.
Consumer storage is about transfer rates and latency. How fast can I access this file, load it to memory and get on with what I'm doing. That's... what it was in the past. WD just ushered in a whole new game of what it means to be at the bleeding edge of storage. Gamers are extremely demanding when it comes to load times and even download speeds. High IOPs means faster load times. In otherwords you can transfer a sequential file at lightspeed thats great, but what about finding and transferring 400 files in a second? If your drive isn't good at that then it's not a bad drive, it'd just no SN750.
WD has an attractive utility called Western Digital SSD Dashboard that does a really great job of providing a quick high level view of your drive or if you want a surprisingly low level set of data to check out.
Having a Life Remaining meter is quite helpful and being able to monitor your SSDs temperature? Pretty snazzy!
To note the Transfer IOPS meter is actually fairly close to what the drive is really performing at. WD shoots a bit conservatively for both read and write, which is nice. WD has taken the honest road and not fudged the numbers.
The gritty details. You can dive quite deep into what is basically a UI version of nvme-cli's stats commands.
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Performance :
Transfer rates are advertised as being 3470MB/sec read and 3000MB/sec write. ATTO shows a small disparity on that number. I'm testing with a weaker CPU than the 7700k 4.2GHz WD used. This is an expected slowdown due to that bottleneck. Still... when your SSD is bottle necked by your CPU? That's impressive.
Anvil's Storage Utilities is far more accurate showing an astounding 224k IOPs at 4k QD 32. Once again these numbers are going to be different than WD's due to my tests being performed with a weaker CPU.
Last but not least, and one of the best features of the drive, is the thermals. SSD controllers run hot. They can throttle pretty easily especially after a huge write. I was attempting to cook this with a Vega 52 and 64 in crossfire while writing to the drive. It didnt break the 62C mark and my office is ambient around 70F or 22C. My Phison enterprise drive usually cooks around 75 degrees under load and then starts throttling hard. The SN750 will start throttling around 75 degrees but good luck getting it there, unless you seal your case you won't throttle. Enjoy those write speeds because they'll only drop when the cache is stuffed full.
Speaking of cache the SSD seems to have about an 8GB DRAM cache for writes. Why is that important? Almost all SSDs have some super high fast cache before the writes are actually made. Pretty much every NVMe drive is going to use some sort of caching. Even the most expensive drive you can buy is going to have a pretty sharp decline in write performance once you fill the cache and continue to write. In most situations you won't see that here but when you do expect your write speed to go from 2800MB/sec to around 740.
So final thoughts. Should you buy the SN750 Heatsink over a 970 Pro 1TB? Yes. Yes you should. Hands down you are getting a significantly better deal. The 970 Pro 1TB is $330 USD at the time I wrote this. Compare that to the SN750s $280 price tag. That's a pretty big difference. Considering that WD's drive is basically neck and neck with Samsung's it would be silly to not go with WD.
Once again, as with any review or overview I post here :
This product was provided to me by WD at no cost. I was not paid or coerced to write a positive or negative review about the product. That said? This drive is a Lambo for the enthusiast. I think this is a perfect fit for AMD builds. The price to performance is amazing.
That WD has some nice Write times and even picks up on the Reads (compared to my old Samsung 960 Pro). Thanks for the review!
daquteness also posted his bench on the new Corsair MP510 which boasts some great numbers and value ($130 currently on Amazon):
