Western Digital WD Black SN750 SE NVMe M.2 2280 500GB PCI-Express 4.0 Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) WDS500G1B0E

Pros: -Very, very fast, pushing towards class-leading performance specs -Durability specs on par with class-leading products, and a warranty to match -Outstanding speed-to-cost ratio

Cons: -Heat sink is pure marketing, as far as I can tell -Binding arbitration clause in the fine print, forcing the buyer to waste time and a stamp writing to WD in order to get normal American consumer protections

Overall Review: My initial impression of this product are very positive. Install was trouble-free. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test clocks it at 2723.6 write, 2895.3 read in my system. This is quite good, a full 25% faster than the Samsung 960 Pro product it replaced in my system on write speed (measured, not claimed). Read speed is basically a wash against the 960 Pro. Indeed, this product seems very competitive with the newer 970 Pro in terms of speed, endurance spec, and warranty. Of course, endurance spec is one thing and actual endurance is another, so time will tell, but off the bat this product seems to deliver very close to class-leading performance at a really excellent price-point. My only qualms so far: First, as far as I can tell, the heat sink and non-heat-sink versions of this product are identical in absolutely every regard, aside from the block of aluminum. Temperatures on mine are well within tolerances, even after hammering 4K video writes to it, so the heat sink appears to be purely decorative in function in a system with adequate cooling. This is not to say it doesn't work, only that the underlying product is identical in form and function without it. The manufacturer could just say as much and save customers some time. Second, buried in the fine print of the manual is a binding arbitration clause. You can opt out but you have to write to WD to do so. That fact that you now need to take extra steps buried in the fine print in order to access consumer protections that we consider normal in the United States (i.e. the right to recoup your money in a class action suit if a product turns out be defective) does not give me a warm-and-fuzzy feeling about WD. TL;DR: Seems great so far, if you are looking for high-performance but concerned with value as well this appears to hit the sweet spot. Just don't waste your money on the heat sink. My environment is a Gigabyte z370/Intel i9 8700k under Mac OS 10.13 (High Sierra), APFS formatted. I am using this product as for project file storage for motion graphic applications (Adobe After Effects).

Pros: Fast. Running on a Synology server with two 1TB SN750’s on a (E10M20-T1) 10gbEthernet/dual slot NVME pci card. All this to Cashe a 50TB NAS. Noticed Dramatic improvement even at 1 GB Ethernet connection speeds. Main reason I went with this card as opposed to some of the other ones out there was due to comments I read about how other NVME’s can get hot. Current temps are running at 33/34C. And have been going for the last 3 days non stop. Have not measured read write speeds but everyone who has logged on has mentioned how much quicker it is while using the Synology apps. Even from a friend logging in from japan! Not sure what the actual read/write speeds are and how this will do long term working in a constant read/write environment in a raid configuration. But so far so good. The next test will be when I get my new iMac with a 10gb connection and run the system at full tilt.

Cons: None so far.

Overall Review: What’s not to love about going fast!

Pros: Rivals the Samsung variant and beats it out in other machine setup. Thankfully in my setup it performs amazingly well! I'm so happy I purchased this instead of the Samsung EVO Plus. No need to install special software to unlock its full potential. Amazingly fast and super responsive!

Cons: I cant get the life expectancy of the remaining writes in the cells like I did with the Samsung Evo 860 SATA drive it replaced. I used HWiNFO64 to get this information.

Overall Review: Amazing m.2 drive! Fantastic engineering WD and Sandisk! I have this drive installed as my primary boot drive. And let the numbers speak for themselves! I would highly recommend this drive to anyone. And finally a worthy rival to the Samsung EVO Plus drive and for far less in price! ASUS HERO X z370 Intel i5 8600k @ 5GHz OC G.Skill Trident Z RGB 32GB 3400 OC EVGA 1070 Ti I was able to achieve the full speed and potential of this drive without the use of special software. I used CrystalDiskMark v7.0 Seq Q8T1 R 3417.88 / W 3099.92 Seq Q1T1 R 2555.66 / W 2899.39 Ran Q32T16 R 2172.24 / W 1760.11 Ran Q1T1 R 53.42 / W 183.22

Pros: Runs as advertised Dropped in and went

Cons: None

Overall Review: Got back into pc gaming a month ago and started out simple with an HP omen. (Best Buy was running a great deal) Only issue I ran into right off the bat was the 256 GB SSD it came with. Filled that with 4 games. Did a bunch of research and picked this up knowing I will be building a full rig after next gen graphics drop. Everything is great now that it's up and running. I did have issues with cloning the old SSD because as I found out HP was not as upgrade friendly when it comes to the SSD. I've been away from PC building for 5 years so I know my knowledge isn't all there with the new tech but I ended up having to use two different apps to clone the way I wanted. From what I gathered on the forums HP may not like people cloning their OEM drives out of their PC's. In the end I paid for Acronis but it wouldn't clone the drive so I used Macrium (free) to clone the drive then swapped back to Acronis to deal with the partitions because for whatever reason neither would do both. Even with the learn on the fly approach I was able to get everything done in about a half hour with the clone process itself being 15 mins. I picked up the Asus Arion for the enclosure which I know was over kill but Im using the old SSD as a flash drive and like the enclosure. Ran ATTO and went from 144MBs write 722MBs read old drive to 2.8 GB/s write 3.2 GB/s read on this. I'm still in awe as I compare this to my old Sata SSDs in Raid and barely hitting 800MBs read...

Pros: Reaches advertised speeds with no fuss

Cons: No heat sink (but not really a con). You could put on an small adhesive heatsink for a Raspberry Pi though.

Overall Review: The drive works as expected and in some cases better than expected. My drive reaches an average of 3500(+/-)150MiB/s cached read, 1600(+/-)80MiB/s buffered read, cached write of 2000(+/-)200MiB/s, and buffered write of 900(+/-)200MiB/s. Overall a good drive and I can't complain!

Pros: - Great performance for the price - Close to advertised speed, getting 3150MB/s READ 2900MB/s Write - SSD Dashboard is decent and has most common features - Acronis True Image WD Edition is very helpful (especially the bootable media) - Cheaper than a Samsung NVMe

Cons: none

Overall Review: This drive is really a good balance of performance and price. I installed this in a Silverstone ECM24 expansion card and runs well. The SSD tools are not as feature rich as Samsung, but they add a lite version of Acronis True Image that works VERY well. It supports RAID drives as well, which I know some older clone software does not. I cloned from a pair of RAID0 SSD's to this NVMe VERY quickly.

Pros: Very easy to install, and very quick to partition and format once installed. The speed is impressive and 1TB in this amount of space is very convenient.

Cons: Didn't come with the screw required for installation. I had to head to my local Ace Hardware and fortunately they could help. The screw size is 2.0 x 3mm (CM2x3-3.3). If you are not replacing an existing M.2 drive, assume you probably need to go out and buy the screw in order to install this drive.

Overall Review: I would certainly recommend this product, and in fact will be planning to purchase another one to put in my other computer.