The WD Black SN750 SE, capable of 3600MB/s reads, is going cheap.
For the sake of comparison, the cheapest other PCIe 4.0 drive I can spot on Amazon is the Crucial P5 Plus, whichretails for £63right now - considerably more expensive. That drive is a bit faster, and can support the PS5 in addition to the PC, but will offer a very similar experience when it comes to PC game load times. DirectStorage might offer more of an advantage to picking up a faster drive, but the rapid-loading technology will support both the SN750 SE and the SN850 when it finally appears in a game at some point in the future.
The SN750 SE outperforms most budget NVMe SSDs that we’d expect to see in this category, like the WD SN550 and Crucial P2, by about 50% - 3600MB/s versus 2400MB/s. The P2 was also released as a TLC drive, with the performance and longevity benefits that offers, but Crucial did announce that the P2 could use QLC in the future. So that’s another small point in favour of the SN750 SE.
The eagle-eyed among you might spot a curiosity: how come this PCIe 4.0 drive operates at speeds close to the boundary of a PCIe 3.0 drive? Or in other words, what’s the point of having a PCIe 4.0 drive if it doesn’t outperform a PCIe 3.0 one? The answer is to do with efficiency - using the more modern PCIe 4.0 connector allows the drive to use fewer lanes to achieve the same levels of speed, cutting power usage in the process. That’s not a massive deal on a desktop, though you’d presume that there’d be some thermal benefit that could help sustained performance… but on a laptop where NVMe drives can make up a more significant chunk of total system power draw, using a PCIe 4.0 SSD if your laptop supports it could boost your battery life a little bit.
In summary, this is a good 500GB drive for the money, with loads more performance than you’d expect from a cheap-o PCIe 3.0 drive like the Crucial P2 or WD SN550, so it’s well worth picking up at this discounted price - especially as you get a free game that’s actually worth playing in the process. Let me know what you think in the comments, and stay tuned for the next deal!
