excellent painstaking review. what i'm left with then is an issue of trust. i trusted the WD Red spinners, but WD has called that trust into question with their unannounced re-spec of certain SSD's. just like i will not buy a psu from Gigabyte (and check three times on their mobos like i did with X570s Aero G), WD is no longer a go-to for storage as they once were for me. i've had nothing but excellence from Micron (Crucial p5+ is amaze-balls) and i'm using Mushkin Pilot-E in my NAS since i replaced my last (Hitachi) spinners. they are able to use Opal encryption too, tho' that's not a biggie for me at home. at work it IS a biggie but i just copied what was working well.

The numbers for the black and blue are odd. Blue seems spot on write slow read but the black is not only significantly slower than the blue but is 50ish percent slower than ratings and personal use observed of both drives daily. Only time I observe massive write slow downs is when underpowered in a bus powered external. The black needs 90 plus percent of the available wattage not including the enclosures chipset. Best case use in that scenario is plugged directly to a thunderbolt dock. I've never seen such low numbers even when under powered and outside of cache limits. Thanks for the awesome amount of information none the less.

Someone please do a review on the SN730. Thank you.