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With the SN750 family of drives, Western Digital have introduced new branding for the Black NVMe series. The drive arrives in a smallish box with a clear image of the drive on the front. WD is obviously keen to let you know that this is a fast drive, too, as the 3,470MB/s Sequential read figure is displayed in the bottom right corner of the box. The drives capacity is displayed in the upper right hand corner.
The rear of the box has a small clear plastic panel through which part of the drive is visible, sitting in its protective plastic enclosure. To the right of this panel is another image of the drive while to the left of it is that Sequential read figure again, along with icons displaying the fact it uses 3D NAND and that it is supported with a 5 year warranty. The only other thing in the box is a Technical Support and Warranty Guide.
WD’s Black SN750 Heatsink edition is a single sided PCB design, so the rear of the drive is empty, with all the components covered by the EKWB heatsink. Under it sits a pair of SanDisk 256Gb die, 64-Layer 3D TLC NAND packages, the in-house WD controller and a 1GB SK Hynix DDR4 cache IC.
The EKWB (EK Waterblocks) heatsink is, as you might expect from the Slovenian cooling specialists, well designed and constructed. The silver and black finished cooler uses 21 fins across the top section with an aluminium base plate. The cooler uses six small Hex screws (3 per side) to hold it together.
As befitting WD's performance range, the WD Black SN750 uses the latest incarnation of WD's SSD Dashboard management utility which has had a pretty dramatic going over. Not only does it look better than the old version, it also includes a gaming mode which if enabled reduces latency by disabling the low power modes via the firmware.
The Dashboard allows you to monitor drive status, performance, perform secure erases (currently only by making a bootable USB device), update firmware and monitor temperatures. There’s no cloning tool integrated into the utility but you can download Acronis True Image WD Edition from the WD website.
