In part of our catching up with WD’s product lineup, I took a look at the WD Blue SN570. Well, last month they also introduced their newest WD Black SSD, the WD Black SN770. The SN770 slots in above the SN750 SE which came out last year and the older PCIe 3.0 SN750 and behind last year's SN850 Flagship SSD which is also from the WD Black line. It’s still weird thinking of a SN700 series drive not being the top drive but what is more interesting is the WD Black lineup expanding out with multiple gaming options in the M.2 SSD market now. Today I’m going to check out what makes the SN770 tick and check out the performance of the 1TB model that WD sent over. Let’s dive in.

Product Name:   WD Black SN770 1TB

Review Sample Provided by: Western Digital

Written By: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

Photos and Features

Black on black on black is the theme for the packaging on the WD Black SN770. The box has a flat black background and over that, they have printed gloss black dots and the WD Black brand across it. Then in front of that, they have a picture of the SSD across the front. The top left repeats the WD Black brand with the model number below that in a smaller white font. Then down in the bottom right corner, they have the drive size which ours is a 1TB drive and they designate that this is a PCIe 4.0 drive with the Gen 4 below the capacity. They also highlight the drives read speed below that as well. On the back of the box, there is another picture of the drive and they repeat the read speed as well as list what comes in the drive. The only important information back here is a small shield that shows the 5-year warranty and the window in the middle that lets you see the drive itself inside to scan the serial number and so you can confirm and make sure the drive size is correct.

Inside is the same setup as we saw with the WD Blue 570, the SN770 comes in a clear plastic tray that locks in its place. There is then a clear plastic cover over top of that. There aren’t any accessories and just the one thing for documentation which is a paper with information on the warranty and a list of contact information for technical support should you have any trouble.

So with the drive itself, just like with the SN570 the drive doesn’t look anything like the picture of the SSD on the front of the box. That isn’t to say I don’t like the way the SN770 looks, but when there is a picture of the product on the box and for that matter on Amazon and Newegg you expect it to look like the pictures but the SN770 doesn’t. The pictures show a sticker the full length of the drive but like the SN570 the SN770 has a smaller sticker on the center of the drive and the components exposed. The drive looks great though. The PCB has a nice flat black finish and the sticker in the center is black with the WD Black logo and the SN770 branding as well as your model and serial numbers printed on it.

The back of the SN770 doesn’t have any components on it. It does have the black PCB but on this side, you can see that it is the black PCB which looks a little glossier on this side. I’m not sure if the front has a different coating or it is just the PCB playing tricks on my eyes. The back has all of the certification logos printed in a bright white and they also have the full Western Digital branding back here where they stick with the WD Black brand on the front and all of the packaging. 

Back on the top side, the SN770 has a similar layout to the WD Blue 570 where the controller is up near the M.2 slot with the resistors below that then the NAND down at the end. Only for the SN770 the NAND isn’t as far down the drive, there is a half-inch of space beyond it before you get to the end of the drive and the resistors below the controller are moved to the center slightly. That does mean that the SN770 is a DRAMless SSD like the SN570. This is a change from the SN750 and the SN850 as well which both had DRAM to be used as a cache on the drive. For the controller, the SN770 has a SanDisk branded in house made controller with the model number 20-82-10081-A1, which isn’t far off from the controller on the SN570 which was the 20-82-10048-A1, but being a full internal design there isn’t too much known about the controller other than it is a 4 channel design and that obviously it supports PCIe 4.0 and can be run DRAMless using HMB in place of the cache. This also means that the SN770 isn’t ideal for the PS5 which doesn’t support HMB so keep that in mind as well. For the NAND there is just one chip on the only possible chip location. This is also SanDisk branded and has the model 001397 1T00 etched into the top and what we do know is that this is 112-layer BiCS 3D TLC memory and the 1T in that shows the drives 1TB capacity. The SN770 can also be found in 250GB, 500GB, and 2TB capacities. Those drive sizes will change the overall TBW or drive endurance with the 2TB at 1200, the 1TB here at 600, 500GB at 300, and the 250GB only 200.

Test Rig and Procedures

Performance

Before getting into performance testing I did run the WB Black SN770 in CrystalDiskInfo. I do this to double check that I am connected at the correct speeds which in this case is PCIe Gen 4 x4. I also like to document the firmware version of our drive when testing in case it is needed in the future. Beyond that, it is using the standard NVMe 1.4 driver and everything was good to go.

My first round of testing was to run the SN770 through Crystal Disk Mark 8. Sequential testing is usually a best-case scenario and is what companies use for their specifications and on the front of the box to advertise as drive speeds. So I wanted to see if the SN770 was reaching the 5150 MB/s listed on the box and in the specifications for the read performance and 4900 MB/s in the specifications for the write speeds. I have the numbers split up between read and write performance and I also marked the PCIe 3.0 drives blue and new PCIe 4.0 drives in orange for reference. The SN770 averaged 5223 MB/s for the read speed which was 73 MB/s over the listed specification and 4983 MB/s for the writes which were 83 MB/s over the specifications as well which isn’t too bad. For comparison of the drives, we have tested this year there is a group of drives that are all faster on the read speeds but the SN770 is faster than all of the older PCIe 4.0 drives and all of the PCIe 3.0 drives. The SN770 is up closer to the top on its write speeds with just the Fury Renegade way out ahead and the P5 Plus and Rocker 4.0 Plus only barely ahead of the SN770. While I don’t have the SN750 in these results, it being a gen 3 drive was back in the 3400 read and 3000 write range as well.

While testing in CrystalDiskMark 8 I did also check out the drive’s IOPS performance with the random 4k queue depth of 32 and 1 thread results. I stacked the read and write performance together here because I do believe that the overall drive performance is important, not just one result or the other. The SN770 did surprisingly well in the combined results, running right with the Fury Renegade. This was because of its write IOPS being the best of the drives tested. For the read IOPS, it was in the middle of the pack for the PCIe 4.0 drives.

In AS SSD I skipped over the standard test because it is very similar to the CrystalDiskMark tests I prefer to check out one of its sub-tests, the copy benchmark. This moves three files, one that is an ISO, one that is a program, and then a game and times how long each takes. With these being timed, lower is better here. I have all three results stacked to see which drives are best overall. The WD Black SN770 performed very similarly to the Patriot P400 which was just .01 of a second faster on the ISO test and .01 of a second faster overall.

Next up with PassMark Performance Test 10 I ran their combined synthetic benchmark to get a look at their DiskMark rating. The SN770 comes in below the top drives but close to the P400. This is also a great look at how the SN770 compares with the SN570 and how much PCIe 4.0 as a whole can open up performance for NVMe drives.

I then changed my focus back over to IOPS performance and ran the SN770 in Anvil’s Storage Benchmark focusing on the 4k queue depth of 16 results from the main test. Once again, like in our previous IOPS test the SN770 dominates when it comes to its write IOPS with that result being the second fastest. This makes up for the mid-range read IOPS and put the SN770 second overall in the combined result.

Sticking with Anvil’s Storage Utilities I did a few more tests. Here I wanted to check out how the drive would react to different queue depths so with the file size set to 4K I ran tests ramping up double each time starting at 1 and up to 128 for reads and 64 for writes. This lets us see if the controller gets overloaded. For the read, queue depth tests the WD Black SN770 started quick, with just two drives faster, its wrap up was similar to the older PCIe 4.0 drives up until a queue depth of 64 where it jumped back up closer to the top but still a little behind the top drives. For the write queue depth test it was kind of the other way around with the early performance being middle of the pack. At a queue depth of 8, the write performance jumped up and was second only to the Fury Renegade of the drives tested.

For ATTO Benchmark I set it to a queue depth of just 1 but ramped up the file size slowly to see how it would affect performance. For the read test in ATTO, the SN770 ran right with the Renegade and the Rocket 4.0 Plus up to the 128KB range then it fell off and from there on came in behind the top four drives with one hiccup at 2MB. The SN770’s write performance was similar, running near the top up to 128KB once again but then falling off and running flat (and dropping a little at a time) from 512KB on in the mid 4000 range. In the end, it was third overall behind the Renegade and the Rocket 4.0 Plus with the P5 Plus and P400 performing right with the SN770.

Next up I wanted to look at more real-world performance and for this, I started with PCMark 10 which has an overall full system benchmark for storage and then one focused on data storage drives. In the full system drive benchmark, the WD Black SN770 did well with just the Renegade outperforming it. But it was the data drive benchmark that the SN770 stands out on with it being the fastest drive tested there.

Next, up for more real-world resting, I did our file transfer tests. You don’t get any more real-world than this. For each drive, I copied the folder filled with files to the drive tested and then back to the Rocket Q4 in our test bench. I used three file types, movies which are large single files, a folder filled with RAW and JPG photos, and then a folder filled with word documents. The WD Black SN770 did well on the movie file transfers, especially compared to the SN570. It was only behind the Fury Renegade for pulling the files to the drive but was slower sending them back, coming in behind a majority of the Gen 4 drives for that. It struggled with the medium-sized pictures when writing to the drive, with even the SN570 being faster there but wasn’t too bad sending those back to the PC. Then for the documents, it struggled as well when they were writing to the SN770 but was the fastest drive tested sending the files back to the PC.

Last up I did take a look at the overall thermals of the WD Black SN770. For this I used out Flir and to heat things up I ran AIDA64’s disk benchmark with a linear read for 20 minutes. The SN770 installs upside down in this location on our motherboard but you can see that all of the heat is being generated down at the slot end where the controller is located just like on the SN570 from last week. The rest of the drive is sitting at 41c but even through the PCB, this end is running 55c which is 6c more than the SN570 even in the same situation. The SN770 isn’t running hot, but it does run hotter than its little brother.

Overall and Final Verdict

After the introduction of the WD Black SN850 last year as their flagship drive and having the SN750 around still as their fast PCIe Gen 3 drive I was surprised with the introduction of the SN770. For one I assumed the 800 series naming would be for the Gen 4 drives and 700 would stick for the PCIe Gen 3 drives. But that all changed last year with the SN750 SE which was a Gen 4 drive and is just cemented now with the SN770. Rather than having just the WD Blue M.2 for creators and then the one WD Black drive Western Digital has expanded that out a little which makes sense. A lot of people who are shopping for gaming drives aren’t looking at the highest end, but they also don’t want a slower drive as well.

The question is, performance-wise, does the SN770 fit that. After going through our testing I would say so. Sadly I haven’t had the chance to check out the SN850, but even just going off of its specs we know it still sits out in front of the SN770 and the other Gen 4 drives I have tested so far this year. The SN770 on the other hand comes in a little behind the flagship drives from other companies like the Fury Renegade but well ahead of the older Gen 4 drives. In some cases, it is even out in front of drives like the Renegade like with the SN770’s write IOPS which were impressive each time I tested them. It was also great in almost all of our real-world focused tests like the file transfers and PCMark 10 with it only struggling with the photo file transfers. In the end, I would call this a mid-range high-end drive. It could perform better in the read IOPS tests and sequential performance was below the top few drives tested but overall you are going to see solid performance from the SN770.

Beyond that, the drive does have the same 5-year warranty that the SN570 also had. Its styling isn’t bad as well with a very simple layout that allows for the branding sticker to be right on the PCB and of course, the SN770 has the blacked-out PCB and sticker just like you would expect from any WD Black product. My only complaint there was that this drive just like the SN570 has a completely different look in the picture of the drive on the packaging and on most retailers as well. I like the rendered look or the actual drive look, but I can see some people not being happy that the drive doesn’t look like they expect it to look shopping in retail or even online with both the box and Newegg/Amazon having the wrong picture.

The WD Black SN770 comes in more drive size options than the SN850 with it being available in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB.  The 1TB drive that I’m testing today is normally listed at $129.99 but from the start of writing this to the finish that price has gone on sale for $114.99 on their website and Amazon. For comparison the WD Blue SN570 is $109 normally but is down to $99 and as long as you have a PC that can support PCIe 4.0 the extra money is well worth it. Running with drives like the P400 in performance but at a cheaper price and with a better warranty as well and the Fury Renegade which was faster but for the price of the 1TB SN770 the Renegade would only get you half the capacity.

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.