Western Digital Black SN770 NVMe 1TB SSD

The WD Black SN770 is the company’s latest NVMe PCIe Gen4 SSD, featuring an in-house SanDisk controller and available in capacities up to 2TB. This DRAM-less client drive is meant for most general use cases, including gaming, demanding software, and speedy OS boot-ups. With PCIe Gen4 adoption and motherboard support now mainstream, WD indicates that the SN770 will help consumers make their transition to the new technology more affordable and accessible. The SN770 is the budget model of the WD Black line, with the impressive SN850 as the flagship option.

WD Black SN770

For performance, the WD quotes the SN770 with sequential read speeds up to 5,150MB/s (1TB and 2TB models), while write speeds are expected to hit up to 4,900MB/s for the 1TB model. These read and write numbers are 40 and 60 percent higher than the previous SN750SE model. For random reads and writes, WD expects users to see up to 740,000 IOPS in reads (1TB model) and up to 800,000 IOPS in writes (1TB and 2TB models).

WD has also added advanced thermal management to the SN770, indicating that it will allow for more consistent performance and a 20% increase in power efficiency over their past NVMe SSD releases. For reliability, the Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) rating is specced at 1.75 million hours.

From the hardware side, WD says the SN770 features a new in-house controller and the SSD leverages a DRAM-less design. This allows it to maintain a lower cost profile, but traditionally, means the SSD will see some performance hit under intensive workload conditions.

Backed by a limited 5-year warranty, the WD Black SN770 is available for approximately $60 (250GB), $80 (500GB), $130 (1TB), and $270 (2TB). We will be looking at the 1TB model for this review.

WD Black SN770 Specifications