Recently the increasing popularity are NVMe drives. Unlike traditional SSDS, where the data is transmitted via SATA interface and a speed of 550 MB/s, it uses a high-speed PCI Express data bus, allowing to achieve indicators of 3940 MB/s. the Most popular steel NVMe drives form factor M. 2.
Sold similar drives for about four years, but until recently, cost quite a lot, but the amount was too small to compete with the traditional SSD. And only in 2018 appeared affordable solutions where one of the most successful was the range of devices from Western Digital. In 2019, the company has updated its product WD Black PC SN750, increasing the maximum amount by updating the firmware, optionally with solutions of the radiator and added mode Game Mode, further increasing performance. We had the opportunity to test the new car, than of course we took advantage.
WD Black PC SN750 sold in four versions: 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB, has a claimed read speed 3470 MB/s and write 3000 MB/s. We got the WD Black PC SN750 (WDS100T3X0C) with capacity of 1 TB and is equipped with a radiator. In “Game mode”, the drive disables power-saving function and it does not go into sleep mode, which reduces latency at the primary accesses to the data. It is no secret that heating drives, like any other device with its own processor, subject to the throttle. To remove it, WD uses aluminum radiators from the well-known Slovenian manufacturer EK Water Blocks. This feature is optional, as in laptops simply will not find a place for it, and some motherboard manufacturers cards and so supply connectors M. 2 cooling systems.
The disk has the format M. 2 2280, and hence, the fees amount to 22x80x2,38 mm. Heatsink width increases to 24.2 mm in height to 8.10 mm. the weight of the drive, 7.5 g, and bundled with the radiator of 33.2 g. the Drive is working on its own dual-core 28-nm controller SanDisk 20-82-007011. Data is written to the 64-layer crystals BiCS3 3D TLC NAND with a size of 256 gigabits. 32, United has 8 pieces 4 of the chip and soldered with one side of the card. Unfortunately, WD decided not to use the more advanced 96-layer flash memory of the fourth generation (BiSC4).
DRAM-SK Hynix buffer size of 1024 MB is made on the basis of high-speed DDR4-2400. Despite the fact that the decision is clearly game, the manufacturer has decided to abandon the lighting. In idle mode, the device consumes 0.1 watts of energy, and when reading/writing – 9,24 W, about 0.6 watts adds Game mode. Important parameter is the reliability of the system: mean time between disk failures – 1.75 million hours, and its life is 600 TB. The manufacturer also gives a warranty for the drive is 5 years.
To activate “Gaming mode” will require a proprietary tool Western Digital SSD Dashboard. I wonder why the manufacturer did not include this option by default. In addition, the program allows you to measure the temperature and speed of data access to determine the free space and service life, to do S. M. A. R. T. check and upgrade firmware, and delete data without possibility of recovery. Windows works with the drive via a standard driver.
For tests we use the following Assembly – motherboard ASRock Z390 Extrime 4, Intel Core i-9 9900K, RAM 2×8 GB 2400 MHz Apacer, Apacer SSD 128 GB and Windows 10 Pro. The drive was tested in normal mode and in Game Mode. To check the effect of the cooling system, additionally, has been tested by disk WD Black PC SN750 512 GB without the radiator. The efficiency of the cooling system was immediately apparent: in the first case, the temperature of storage did not rise above 39 degrees, in the second case, the heating was already up to 57 degrees, and all tests were carried out on a heated device.
Analyzing the obtained results, it can be noted that when using “Game mode”, the access time to the disk is significantly decreased, but the speed that has the lowest impact. Unlike synthetic, in real scenarios, when the drive OS is installed, you can still get a slight increase in speed by reducing access time, but hope for some big effect not worth it. But since energy consumption in Gamу mode is not greatly increased, then, if you are using a stationary PC is recommended always to enable it on laptops, he “cost” you the maximum in a couple of minutes of autonomy.
More significant difference can be observed when using the radiator. Although the drive heats up not as much as some competitors, in all tests, the disc without cooling showed results worse. Most important to buy a disc with the radiator assemblies, where there is a big load on the drive around the clock that will not only get rid of the throttle, but to increase the life of the drive. Although the actual speed of reading/writing was lower than stated, it does not prevent the disk to get past most of its competitors.
When compared to the previous generation, the speed performance of the drive has not changed: to increase only by changing the software part was impossible. However, Western Digital has development potential through the use of a 96-layer flash memory. “Game mode” turned out to be more of a marketing decision, not strongly influence the performance, but the use of the radiator really viable technical solution.
WD Black PC SN750 is still a good high-performance solution that extended to 2019 range due to models 2 TB. Last but not least, the company did not set on their top solution high price: a drive, 1 TB will cost about 12 500 rubles, or 13 000 rubles for the version with the radiator. WD Black PC SN750 is one of the best solutions on the market NVMe drives in terms of price and speed characteristics, which will be a great choice for high-performance modern builds.
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