Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB is a very simple looking SSD, both in appearance and physical layout. It comes with no heatsink, so all the components are exposed, as shown in our photo above. The label on the WD_BLACK NVMe SSD is placed between the components and gives it the branding and information such as its model name, capacity, serial number, and manufacturing date. I would much prefer a full-size label for looks, but most motherboards have an included heatsink for PCIe 4.0-based drives anyway.
The SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB is an M.2 2280 format SSD. If you are not familiar with the M.2 physical standard, M.2 2280 means it the size of the drive is 22mm by 80mm, hence its numerical designation. Its components are located on the black printed circuit board, which we will take a closer look at in just a moment. The Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB works on the NVMe 1.4 logical device interface and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, M.2 NVMe interfaces with PCIe 4.0. The Black uses four lanes for up to 8000MB/s bandwidth in each direction. The specified weight is a paltry 5.5g for this SSD.
Flip the Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB around and you will find no components of interest. All there is are regulatory certifications printed on the solder mask. Other than that, it is completely blank as all the components are located on the other side. This drive is made in China, which is where a lot of Western Digital SSDs we have reviewed in the past were made.
Zooming a bit in, and you can see what the Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB is made from. There are two different components that can be seen. At the heart of WD_BLACK's SN770 1TB is a custom controller labeled 20-82-10081-A1. It is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to utilize the bandwidth afforded by the PCIe 4.0 standard. There is no native encryption support. To save cost, no DRAM is available to the controller for system memory. Just for background, SSD DRAM is used as a cache for writing data to the drive and storing a table that maps where each logical block address is physically located on the NAND flash memory. However, DRAM chips are not cheap even if you only need 1GB of DRAM per 1TB of storage, so budget SSDs often omit it to cut cost. Instead, DRAM-less SSDs store the mapping data on the NAND flash itself, which affects performance, as flash memory is orders of magnitudes slower than DRAM. To compensate, the NVMe interface supports something called the Host Memory Buffer, which allows the use of some of your computer's RAM to cache the mapping data. This is not as fast as an SSD having its own DRAM, but still much faster than the SSD's NAND flash memory.
The WD_BLACK SN770's flash memory are SanDisk-rebranded Toshiba 112-layer BiCS5 3D triple-level cells in two chips labeled 001397-1T00. Its rated write endurance is an excellent 600TB, which equates to about 330GB per day for five years. This is the same as the Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB and Crucial P5 Plus 1TB, which is very good, but not anywhere close to the Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB at 1300TBW, a title the FireCuda has held for years. Its rated power consumption is not published. The SN770 can be prevented from entering standby using the Dashboard utility for maximum performance at all times. 24GB out of the 1024GB total capacity -- just under 3% -- is provisioned for the drive controller for overhead, so the actual usable space is 1TB, as advertised. You will see 931GB in Windows.
Specified at 5150MB/s read, 4900MB/s write, up to 740,000 IOPS read, and up to 800,000 IOPS write over NVMe 1.4 on PCIe 4.0 x4, these figures are impressive for a budget model. It is one-and-a-half to twice as fast as most PCIe 3.0-based drives. For comparison, the company's PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe flagship, the SN750 1TB I reviewed three years ago, was rated at only 3470MB/s read and 3000MB/s write. Meanwhile, the PCIe 3.0 x8-based AN1500 2TB add-in card featuring multiple WD_BLACK SSDs in RAID 0 can only hit 6500MB/s read and 4100MB/s write.
To see how all this hardware translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB against the big boys of this game to see how this new budget performance drive from Western Digital steps up against some popular NVMe-based SSDs from manufacturers like Crucial, Gigabyte, Kingston, Patriot, Seagate, XPG, and even Western Digital themselves in the next seven pages or so.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-D15S chromax.black
Motherboard: ASUS TUF Gaming B550-Plus
RAM: Patriot Viper Steel RGB DDR4-3200 2x16GB
Graphics: Gigabyte G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 960 4GB
Chassis: NZXT H700i
Storage: Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
Power: Seasonic PRIME Ultra Titanium 850W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB
- ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB
- Crucial P1 1TB
- Crucial P2 500GB
- Crucial P5 500GB
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
- Gigabyte AORUS RGB AIC NVMe SSD 512GB
- Kingston KC2500 1TB
- Kingston KC3000 1TB
- Patriot P300 512GB
- Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB
- Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB
- Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital Blue SN550 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital Blue SN570 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK AN1500 2TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB
- XPG Atom 50 1TB
- XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Conclusion
