Page 10 - Conclusion
The WD_BLACK SN770 is a simple DRAM-less SSD that has no more than two major components on the board with a rated sequential read speed of only 5150 MB/s, which in every way looks like a budget PCIe 4.0-based NVMe drive than a performance unit at first glance. Is this a true performance SSD like the WD_BLACK brand would suggest, or is the WD_BLACK brand falsely attributed to the product? After running through all the tests, I am still a little bit shocked by what I am seeing. The SN770 demonstrated incredible RND4K Q32T1 and RND4K Q1T1 performance in Crystal Disk Mark. In fact, it was significantly better than anything else I have seen, including a lot of flagship drives like the SN850 1TB. I have also witnessed crushing performance in medium workloads in PassMark PerformanceTest 10 and real-life simulations in PCMark 10 and 3DMark. I know it sounds ridiculous given the specifications of this SSD, but the SN770 is really that good in these tests. Of course, the WD_BLACK SN770 1TB has its limitations, which comes in the form of limited linear read and write performance at around 5000MB/s. But seriously though, we already know this from the specifications, and while it is no competition against flagship drives cracking 7000MB/s over the PCIe 4.0-based NVMe interface, how often will you be able to use that much bandwidth? And of course, we have to acknowledge this is still a DRAM-less SSD. There is only so far a caching algorithm can bring you, but under normal circumstances, it is exceptionally good. Other things the SN770 is missing include no native hardware encryption support and a sticker that only partially covers the drive, but as far as the latter is concerned, you will never really see it, since every PCIe 4.0-based NVMe slot on new motherboards come with a heatsink from the manufacturer. For about $115 at press time, it is priced lower than the Crucial P5 Plus 1TB and XPG Atom 50 1TB. This is an incredible deal for a surprisingly fast SSD, and Western Digital offers a 5-year warranty as the icing on the cake.
Western Digital provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
APH equal.balance Award
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
The Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB is an unbelievably fast SSD in common day-to-day usage scenarios at a very affordable price.
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
