Western Digital’s Black SSD is now focused on gaming, can come with a heatsink

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  The WD Black SN750 without a heatsink. [credit: Western Digital ]

Western Digital has begun shipping the WD Black SN750, the latest in its popular Black line of performance-oriented, solid-state hard drives. The company is also pivoting the Black brand to be primarily focused on gamers; this is part of an ongoing trend that high-end PC hardware is getting categorized as gamer gear.

Western Digital claims the newest entry will offer an option to help PC gamers reduce risk of throttling-related performance dips. That's thanks to an optional heatsink add-on, but the company also credits improved performance to firmware refinements. Other than that, the WD Black SN750 is a modest update over its predecessor. Anandtech benchmarked it and saw some performance improvements over the previous drive, but nothing dramatic-and what improvements were there were largely thanks to the firmware.

The SN750 still uses the same 64-layer 3D NAND we've seen before, while some competitors are introducing 96-layer 3D NAND products. Nevertheless, the SN750 remains an attractive option for performance-minded gamers because of its power efficiency, because of its more-than-good-enough performance, and because the prices are more attractive than they once were.

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