WD Black SN770M 1TB NVMe SSD review

PC gaming has always had a indigent history when it comes to portability of its endeavors. The fact is that for a long time, the same chips that powered our high-end gaming desktops were simply too hungry to be baked into a portable gaming console. Fast forward to the launch of Steam Deck (sorry, Elgato) and we finally have an absolute armada of modern handhelds entering the fray. They are all aggressively priced and equipped with enough top-of-the-range hardware to provide an immersive and enjoyable gaming experience on the go. However, there is a caveat, as there often is, and it concerns storage.

It’s one of those things, right? If you don’t have enough of it on your gaming PC, it sucks. You’re constantly struggling, deleting, redownloading, and constantly worrying that modern games won’t install. Manufacturers being what they are, they don’t usually include vast drives in their pocket computers. This is where the WD_Black SN770M 1TB model from Western Digital comes into play.

Perhaps it was no surprise, given the success and avalanche of handheld devices entering the arena, that we weren’t greeted with an arsenal of SSDs to back them up. After all, many of us may have mistakenly held on to the cash and opted for the cheaper 512GB or, even worse, 256GB Steam Deck at launch, and after a few installs probably saw that little red bar demanding that we delete some of our hard-earned games before installing more.

But you know all this, it’s been a while since the Steam Deck launched (in fact, the Steam Deck OLED has landed since then, though still with a PCIe 3.0 SSD), so the better question is that now that time has passed and the Is among the available in the market for a range of M.2 2230 drives, is Western Digital’s legendary black line, especially in the form of the SN770M 1TB model, still as competitive as before?

That’s why I’m here, to both test and respond.

As with most of these tiny form factor drives, there’s an captivating combination of hardware here. Unlike the entire range of PCIe 5.0 drives, all of which feature the same Phison E26 controller paired with Micron’s 232-layer TLC NAND memory, the SN770M includes one of Sandisk’s (a subsidiary of WD) 20-82-10081- A1 combined with a really neat TLC Flash NAND.

It has less DRAM, no cache or anything like that, but that’s all we really know about it. While it may seem strange at first glance that WD would deviate from what it did with the full-size WD Black SN770 drive (which works with Toshiba’s 112-layer BiCS5 TLC drive) and instead exploit a 112-layer Kioxia drive, this is purely a branding exercise because Kioxia is part of Toshiba as a whole.

So it’s the same as WD SN770? Well, not really, this single-sided design and single chip with no cache doesn’t give WD much room to maneuver when it comes to overall performance. Moreover, the only thing we know about this Sandisk controller is that it is based on the older 16nm process. Given the form factor, this will inevitably cause it to heat up under load for extended periods of time without adequate cooling. Less than ideal if trapped in a closed little ROG Ally.

For my own tests, I put all of these drives through various benchmarks using an Asus ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi motherboard paired with an AMD Ryzen 9 9900X. This means that this element is covered with a very broad heatsink, which helps with longer benchmarks such as the I/O Meter and 3D Mark memory test. However, since I’m doing this on all drives, and it’s typically done at workloads that aren’t equivalent to gaming handhelds, it shouldn’t affect my overall conclusions at all.

How do you do it then? Well, sequential performance was almost as advertised, clocking in at 5.2GB/s read and 5.0GB/s write. Random performance at 4K resolution was also 79 and 305 MB/s in both tests, respectively.

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Compared to something like the Crucial P310, which is certainly much slower in sequential performance, however, you’re really not likely to see sequential loads that often on a mobile device. On the other hand, 4K performance was much worse, as the WD SN770M pushed the Crucial all the way to the bottom in reads (79 MB/s to 76 MB/s), but lost in the write test, cutting its tail by 10 MB/s. 3D Mark also agrees with this, putting both drives to a memory test and the results are extremely even. The Crucial scored 3,075 compared to the SN770M’s 3,056. Similarly, the bandwidth was within percentage limits and the access time was identical at 59 ns.

Move on to Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringer’s stress tests, and the SN770M is the slowest of the bunch tested, with a positively (not really) leisurely time of 8.389 seconds. It’s slower than the 8.101 in the P310, although not by much. I talked about this at length in my Crucial P310 review, but the reality is that it’s incredibly hard to see from a real-world perspective.

So where is this great victory? Is the WD Black SN770M the best SSD for your MSI Claw right now? Is this worth paying attention to on Black Friday? Honestly, yes. While the 1TB variant may not have as much capacity compared to the 2TB P310, it actually performs just as well and comes at an astonishingly low cost in comparison. As I write this, the price for the 1TB version is currently just $90, and that’s not even a holiday. In fact, the price has dropped to $85 in the past, and given the current shape of NAND prices, I expect it to drop even further.

This isn’t perfect. Under long, intense loads this device gets nasty, and its performance is a bit lagging behind more contemporary designs like the P310, or larger PCIe 4.0 drives like Lexar’s NM790, but honestly what it’s intended for and how it works is up to you top notch and worth considering.