Western Digital WD Black SN750, 500GB PCIe Gen3 NVMe M.2-2280 Internal Solid State Drive

Gave a new life to an old pc, now it runs fast , recommend

I had this in my old i7 machine and finally upgraded to an i9-12900K with Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Pro X and 32GB of DDR5 7200 RAM. This is my secondary storage, and this motherboard has four M. 2 slots.The speed is excellent, and while it's not fast compared to the latest and greatest m.2, it makes a world of difference in writing and reading.I was a bit worried with the age and how long it's been running but seems to be very solid. Fast and worth it!

This is my first experience with NVMe storage in my personal computer. I'm honestly completely blown away with how fast this drive is. Over the years I've gone from 5400RPM mechanical drives to 3D NAND SATA SSDs to this NVMe PCIe storage. I was initially very put off from this style of drive because of the price, but I decided to give it a try with my latest "revamp" of my desktop gaming PC. I was going to be replacing the motherboard and CPU so I figured it would be a decent time to try NVMe M.2 storage. I got the 1TB version with the heatsink; it was on a pretty great sale so I didn't want to pass it up. I've bought a lot of WD drives over the years and have NEVER had a single issue so I find the brand to be incredibly reputable.Installation was very straightforward. My motherboard came with a thermal pad to place underneath the drive to keep the heat away from the underlying PCB. It installed and screwed down without incident. I cloned my old Samsung SATA SSD to the WD drive and expanded the main partition to fill the additional space. The computer booted from the new drive as I hoped and everything is just SO MUCH SNAPPIER. Granted, I made a significant CPU upgrade at the same time, but I can tell that read and write speeds are helping dramatically with opening applications, particularly large and resource-heavy applications like Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. Aesthetics are nice. I find that a lot of PC components anymore are gaudy and "gamery". I don't own a windowed case so I don't really care what the gear inside looks like or what color it is, but the black and silver scheme should match pretty much anything. The heatsink is made by EK Water Blocks who have a very solid reputation the PC water cooling scene.I'm not the kind of guy that benchmarks drives. I'm also not going to go out of my way to buy the absolute "best" drive on the market because it writes a few more bytes per second than the other one. You can go down a rabbit hole really quick of finding the "best" and "fastest" of every computer component. Having said that, it's plenty fast for my needs and I have respect for the WD brand. I can get applications, games, and large photo collections/catalogs open without hesitation. Overall, I'm glad I bought it. It does seem to be expensive, but I do have to remind myself that there's an ENTIRE TERABYTE on a little tiny aluminum stick that just sits right on the motherboard and doesn't require additional power or cables. I will absolutely be sticking with M.2 NVMe drives going forward (at least until something new comes along).

I bought this new SN750 NVMe drive to move my OS from a Crucial SSD. This drive is noticeably faster. Installation was easy, but I did have trouble cloning my OS to this drive without corruption errors. I ended up backing up my pertinent files and fresh installing windows. Since the motherboard or CPU didn't change, Windows recognized my computer and I did not need to repurchase the OS. That being said and really at no fault to the drive, everything else has gone smoothly.PROS:- The drive is fast: The box says read/writes up to 3400MB/s sequentially. However I've found mine, without any cache enhancements, to be about 2900MB/s. Still very fast. With RAM caching of 4GB (which is what I typically use), read/writes came in about 8000MB/s. See the attached benchmark images for no enhancement runs and with enhancement runs. For reference, with caching my Crucial SSD where the OS used to be would average about 800MB/s.- Temps are solid: My motherboard included a m.2 heatsink which I am using for this. The m.2 slot on my board for the NVMe primary slot is right under the graphics card. So, when that starts putting out some heat, this thing will heat up a little as well. Even with that temperatures are in very respectable ranges. After running my benchmarks for the drive, the average was 41C and hottest was 44C, as seen in the image. After a gaming session, the peak temperature I've seen for the drive was 55C, but typically stays under 48C.- Price: The prices for 3D NAND drives have been coming down and probably will continue to do so. Last year at this time, a 500GB drive was about $250. I picked this one up for $120. These will probably come down some more from there. All good news for us consumers.CONS:My only con would be the issues I had with cloning the drive, most of which are not really related to this drive, but more related to the cloning software and my OS.My final thoughts on this are: this drive performs very close to the Samsung 970 Plus drive. They are also about the same price. The Samsung and this are about the fastest drives you can buy at this price-point and are essentially interchangeable. The SN750 is vastly superior to an SSD, and the differences are noticeable in everyday use. WD products in my experience have been reliable with no drive failing for me in the past. So to anyone looking to get this, I would recommend.