The WD Black SN770 is probably the most inconspicuous solid-state drive for gamers. On the surface, this is probably an incremental upgrade over our WD Black SN750 and it inches closer to the SN850, but then falls short. That’s still acceptable because the SN770 here is priced reasonably well to be your next fast gaming drive.
WD Black SN770 review
PC gamers, assemble!
For 1TB storage
Pricing
The admission fee for bagging an SN770 is as low as ₹4,749 for 250GB, some thing games like Call of Duty will eat for breakfast. However, the promised Sequential Read and Write speeds of 5,150MB/s and 4,900MB/s are only on the 1TB and 2TB variants. The WD Black SN770 500GB is for ₹6,610 whereas the 1TB is going for ₹12,050.
These pricings are not wallet-friendly as such but if you wait a bit for a price drop, you can save a couple of extra grand on the 1TB option.
Performance
Before we tell you how the SSD performs, it’s important to note that the true performance of the SN770 is only available on PCIe Gen 4 supported systems. It is backwards compatible with Gen 3 as well, but you’ll be bottlenecking your drive to half its speed.
We got a sequential read speed of 5,172MB/s and a write speed of 4,865MB/s on the CrystalDiskMark speed test which is very close to WD’s numbers. These are theoretical speeds and it’s quite impressive. In actual tests, the SSD delivered a respectable read speed of 3,821MB/s and write speeds were closer to the sequential numbers at 4,681MB/s.
However, the question still remains, is it of good value for gaming? The short answer is yes. The long answer is that you must stay on PC gaming only. The SN770 doesn’t pass the litmus test for PS5 owners. So technically the SN850 is still the best WD Black NVMe SSD if you’re looking for that sort of upgrade. Also, keep in mind that the 250GB and 500GB storage options have slower read and write speeds compared to the 1TB option we have here for review.
Other than that the SSD is only good for the new generation of CPUs i.e Intel 11th Gen and Ryzen Zen 3 processors and above. If you’re planning to upgrade your CPU and motherboard to any of these families of processors then the WD SN770 should be in your system by default.
Benchmark PC: Intel 11th Gen i9-11900K, Asus ROG Hero Maximus XIII, 32GB DDR4 RAM, Nvidia RTX 3080
Verdict
The WD SN770 is a fast, reliable (5 years warranty) and gaming PC focused NVMe SSD. Games load fast and the Windows boot time is also faster than the previous gen without the thermal throttling bits.
The cost of getting a 1TB storage option might be a bit too steep right now, maybe even closer to the WD SN850. If that’s the case then we only recommend the SN850. Although if you’re looking to save some extra dough then the Mdcomputers website is the only one selling the SSD at the cheapest price right now.
Stuff Says
Not the cheapest, but definitely a must-have in your Intel 11th Gen PC gaming rig
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Specifications
Capacity: | 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB |
Form Factor: | M.2 2280 |
Interface: | PCIe Gen 4, backwards compatible |