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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