WD BLACK SN750
This positively ancient Gen3 drive still holds its own, especially if your PC doesn’t include a Gen4 slot.
★★★★☆ 1TB, $119 | westerndigital.com
It’s incredible that the WD Black SN750 is still around. Launching back in 2019, this drive has been around for a long time in technology terms. The reason that it’s still available is that this was a flagship drive back in the day. Today, based on the PCI-E Gen3 standard, it’s slower than the competition, yet for an older computer or those looking for a budget drive, it’s still a good buy.
At its time of launch, the drive’s specifications indicated that it was pushing the limits of what the PCI-E 3.0 interface could achieve. Our results show that this is still true. In our sequential benchmark, the drive managed 3,071MB/sec in the read test and 1,828MB/ sec in the write test.
Moving to the random test, the drive managed 1,255MB/sec in the read test and 2,117MB/sec in the write test. Both benchmarks place the drive towards the bottom of the benchmarking tables, but the SN770 still beats some newer drives in the mix. Faster drives in this test tend to use the newer PCI-E Gen4 interface, which offers double the bandwidth; however, these drives need a Gen4 M.2 slot to get these speeds.
In the PCMark 10 benchmarks, the SN750 is towards the bottom of the scoreboard: 1,122 in the System Disk test and 1,423 in the Data Disk test.
That may not sound particularly impressive, but if you have a PC with a PCI-E Gen3 slot, then the WD Black SN750 is still quick. It’s also good value, although we would recommend buying the 1TB version, as it’s not much more expensive than the 500GB option, while the 250GB is too small to be useful. Endurance is as we’d expect for a modern SSD at 600TBW.
Whether this drive is for you depends on what you want to use it for. If you have a Gen 4.0 slot, then the WD Black SN770 is streets ahead of this drive, but not that much more expensive; if you have an older PC in need of an upgrade, however, this is still a solid choice. The only caveat is that if you’re planning a PC upgrade soon and want to keep the storage, buy the SN770 instead.
"If you have a Gen 4.0 slot, then the WD Black SN770 is streets ahead of this drive, but not that much more expensive; if you have an older PC in need of an upgrade, however, this is still a solid choice."