WD_BLACK 500GB SN750 SE NVMe SSD

Review of WD Black SSD. I purchased this as a replacement for my MX500, it cost 70 dollars and then was reduced to 62 and is 70 dollars now. At 70 dollars it is an okay deal, at 62 it is a much better deal. When I first upgraded my computer and I did not know much about ssd and purchased a mx500 m.2 but it was the same price as the sata and I figured that a faster nvme ssd was not worth the difference as a sata ssd is still much faster than a hard drive. However prices came down and you can get a sata and nvme with the nvme being 2-3 as fast for around the same price. See Crucial P1/P2 and western digital blue ssd so it makes sense to get a nvme instead if you can. I wanted one of the 'fastest' ssd so I got the black one considering it was only about 15 dollars more than the tier of ssd below it. Installation: Many reviewers say it is easy to install a m.2. It is not as easy as it sounds, technically plugging it in is not that difficult it is similar to a ram stick. But you have to make sure that your motherboard can fit the size of the m.2. My motherboard could fit a 42,60,80,110 mm m.2 with studs only for 80 and 110. This is an 80 mm BUT it required a special m.2 slot to install that had higher pcie speeds and that slot did not have the correct stud and there was no way to screw it in without purchasing a special stud to place in a hole on the motherboard. Also you have to make sure your PCIe slots on your motherboard is fast enough, you will need a PCIe x3 or PCIe 4. If your PCIe is slower than you won't get the full speed of the ssd. Also on most motherboards installing a faster m.2 slot means shutting down the other sata lanes so you will be able to plug in less peripherals, on mine I can only install 2 other with this ssd installed. Also if you want to install windows 7 which I will get into later on this review, there is a special method. So in reality installing a m.2 ssd can be far more complicated than a sata, where you just plug it in like a hard drive. Also western digital does not provide instructions on installation and actually tells you to have a professional install it. Although you can easily find videos or guides how to install a m.2 ssd online and even youtube video for this drive. Installing on Windows 7: So you still use windows 7? You install the drive and find out windows 7 doesn't see it! Well you can actually still use it. Western digital does not make ssd drivers for windows 7 but there are generic drivers. I do not know how to get the drive to read if you already have windows 7 installed but if you want to install windows 7 you can use special software that pre-installs nvme drivers on a usb disk with your windows ISO. My motherboard is gigabyte but their software didn't work. The one that works with this drive and uses a generic nvme driver is called MSI smart tool. You can install it from their website and you don't need a MSI motherboard to use it. Drive Performance: This drive is rated as up to 3,400 read and 2,600 write and you see in my screenshot this is the case for crystal disk mark and sequential write/read(the most simple test). But on AA SSD it reads around 3,000 and and writes around 2,500 so it is not quite as fast as advertised. I can't say what WD did but I wouldn't doubt they gauged those performance marks on the most popular ssd benchmark. Windows 10 boots up slightly faster, about 2 seconds faster for 9.5 seconds. Windows 10 did install very fast, it took 3 minutes. Overall it is faster and games boot moderately faster over a MX500. My comparison is the mx-500 and this drive is supposed to be around 7 times faster. In reality it is nowhere near 7 times faster. It is a disappointment considering the wd black is considered one of the best and fastest ssds. To be fair normal sata ssd like mx500 is already way faster than a hard drive and there is real world practicality to ssd that you have to consider. You are unlikely to see a huge performance increase in my opinion compared to a normal sata ssd but considreing nvme price of a m.2 like P1 or blue is similar to the sata is still rational to get one of those versus a sata and the performance rating will be 3 times faster. Heatsink: You can get an optional heatsink with this although the motherboard will sometimes come with one. I did not get the heatsink as the reviews indicated it was not necessary. Theoretically because a m.2 can get so hot and can be thermally limited(it automatically slows down when getting hot) it could make sense to get a heatsink and I suppose if you are constantly taxing this drive you should get one. But techpowerup shows this drive is actually among the best for thermal limiting and using in my computer the temperature is around 45 Celsius. Also there is a 10 degree drop in temperature if you put it beneath the video card instead of below it. It makes sense because the hot air from gpu fans is not blowing on it. Software: You can download software from wd called 'dashboard'. It is kind of cheap/gimmicky looking and there are actually two different versions of it oddly. People complain about ads but you can disable them by blocking access to the internet with your firewall. WD reliability: This has a 5 year warranty(although with arbitration clause) and historically I have used WD hard drives and they have been really reliable. But SSD are entirely different and until recently western digital was not very good at making SSD, they were slow and inefficient. Cruicial is among the most reputable in ssd and innovated alot of technology for ssd. But you do get a 5 year warranty so that's good but if you are highly concerned about your data you might want to look more deeply into this. Overall: I give this ssd 3/5 stars. I got this as a gift but if I had paid the whole 70 dollars I would be pretty upset. It is not as high performance as it is marketed and I did not see a huge difference over the sata ssd. It makes sense if your going to get a NVME to go with the tier below this and save money. Guide for SSD. I did alot of research on how to buy a SSD drive and thought that this might be helpful. They are much more complicated than a hard drive. There are three types of form factor for SSD. The SATA, add in card and M.2. SATA is the most user friendly and can be used on most computers but max transfer rate is 600 mb/s. M.2 has a max transfer rate 31,500 mb/s depending on your pcie. Then you have the add in cards that plug in your pci express slot , where you plug in your graphics cards. These cards are the fastest like Intel Optane but are very expensive and are for servers. SSD drives have a 'controller' and that directs your reads and write, it is like a processor but you don't usually need to know much about this and should be able to rely on benchmarks to understand performance.(I recommend techpowerup or anandtech for reviews) Then there is the type of storage flash, there is SLC, MLC,QLC and TLC. The SN750 has TLC. Then there is how the memory chips are arranged and this is why you will see drives advertised as "3D". I thought it is a gimmick at first. 3D ssd have the chips stacked on top of one another. Then you want to consider endurance and this is how long a drive is estimated to last. For this drive it is 1.75 million hours according to western digital ,this may be conservative or overstated. You have to consider the reliability of the brand. The main flaw over SSD over hard drive aside from price is they don't last as long. SSD slowly die. This leads to my final point of guide. Software for your ssd: You want to over provision your drive so that it last longer, this sets aside space for your SSD that your computer never stores data on. Crucial allows you to set this, WD is pre-set and I am not sure if you can manually set a larger space although WD software doesn't allow you to do this. You also want to make sure you have trim turned on in windows 7 and 10(although it is almost always on) and you want to make sure defrag is turned off as the SSD does not need this and you are actually overusing your ssd. The best thing you can do is install SSD fresh if you are not savvy with this stuff and it will do a check list for you. This software is free