WD SN750 Review – Best Gen 3 NVMe SSD?

WD’s SN750 has been out for a fair while now – going on three years at this point which feels like an eternity in the world of tech – but considering PCIe Gen 3 drives are still more than enough for the average gamer, and these drives are coming down in price, the SN750 is looking like possibly the best option on the market right now. Let’s take a look!

First off, I have the 1TB drive here. It’s rated for up to 3430MB/s reads and 3GB/s writes, which is slightly less than the Samsung 970 EVO Plus which quotes 3.5GB/s reads and up to 3.3GB/s writes for it’s 1TB model. They have the same 600 TBW endurance rating, and a 5 year warranty, and even share pretty similar pricing. On the recent Black Friday sales they were listed for the same £85 or so price tag, although off-sale the SN750 is £15-20 cheaper.

So, on paper then, these look almost identical, and looking at the synthetic benchmark numbers they are pretty spot on too. I only had the 250GB version of the 970 EVO Plus in for testing which thanks to its smaller overall capacity means it doesn’t perform quite as well as the larger 1TB version. Still, the two pretty much trade blows with generally higher read performance on the 970, but stronger write performance on the SN750 instead. Even looking at the ATTO test you can see the two sets of lines are pretty similar there, only being overshadowed by the PCIe Gen 4 drives which have literally double the bandwidth.

So they are functionally the same then, right? Well, not quite. Both of these drives use what’s called “SLC Caching”. Basically, writing to a single bit per cell (even if that cell actually has more than one) is faster than trying to write to, in these drive’s cases, the 3 bits each cell contains. The advertised figures for both drives are for writing to this ‘cache’, not the main storage pool, which you could argue is a bit of false advertising but that’s likely a topic for another video. Anyway, the original version of Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus had just 43GB of SLC cache space on the 1TB drive, which after that would drop to more like 1.5GB/s writes. They have apparently quietly revised the drive though, now offering 115GB of ‘cache’, with the tradeoff being the speed after filling the cache is now just 800MB/s instead. Now this SN750 isn’t actually much better, offering a similar, if not even smaller SLC cache, but in the real world the performance is a touch better.

In my usual file duplication stress test, the SN750 was able to write it’s entire capacity at around 1.4GB/s – as in reading and writing simultaneously – which is a fair bit faster than even the SLC cache speeds the 250GB 970 EVO Plus I tested could muster, and thanks to that being a smaller drive with an absolutely miniscule cache it dropped to around 300MB/s average after just 15GB of writing. With that said, that is the smaller capacity version and even the original 1TB drive should offer a better experience and the newer model should be even better – assuming you aren’t writing over 100GB of data at a time.

The SN750 then, is a pretty impressive drive with perfectly usable performance even if you are writing the entire capacity of the drive at a time (and I’m not sure why you would anyway). The 970 EVO Plus isn’t bad either, but especially looking at the current non-sale pricing, the SN750 is a no-brainer. It offers a significant performance improvement over the cheaper DRAMless drives like the SN550, while not breaking the bank. Oh, and if you were wondering about temperatures, while testing in the 5600X B550 system I did a build guide on earlier this week – video in the cards above – with it under a heatsink in the top most slot, it’s absolute maximum was just 57°c, well shy of the 75°c SMART thermal throttling point. So yeah, an impressive drive and especially if you can find it on sale, a great option for your gaming PC.