Upgrade Your Rig. Elevate Your Game. Get into the action now with the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD. This purpose-built gaming drive boasts a PCIe Gen4 interface that delivers blazing speeds of up to 5,150MB/s (1TB and 2TB models). First into the Action Get into the match fast as you zoom past load times with blazing speeds of up to 5,150MB/s2 (1TB and 2TB models). Smoother, Faster Gaming Improve in-game responsiveness and streaming with the PCIe Gen4 interface for a performance boost you can see and feel. The interface is compatible with leading CPU and motherboard platforms and backwards-compatible with PCIe Gen3. Store More Available in capacities up to 2TB, the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD gives you tons of storage for your latest games with space left over for future updates and downloadable content. Turbocharge Your Laptop Get up to 20% more power efficiency at maximum speed over the previous generation (1TB model) for an even better overall gaming experience on your portable rig. Game Longer and Better Optimize peak performance in gaming mode and monitor your drive’s health with the WD_BLACK Dashboard so you can game with confidence.
Upgrade Your Rig. Elevate Your Game. Get into the action now with the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD. This purpose-built gaming drive boasts a PCIe Gen4 interface that delivers blazing speeds of up to 5,150MB/s (1TB and 2TB models). First into the Action Get into the match fast as you zoom past load times with blazing speeds of up to 5,150MB/s2 (1TB and 2TB models). Smoother, Faster Gaming Improve in-game responsiveness and streaming with the PCIe Gen4 interface for a performance boost you can see and feel. The interface is compatible with leading CPU and motherboard platforms and backwards-compatible with PCIe Gen3. Store More Available in capacities up to 2TB, the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD gives you tons of storage for your latest games with space left over for future updates and downloadable content. Turbocharge Your Laptop Get up to 20% more power efficiency at maximum speed over the previous generation (1TB model) for an even better overall gaming experience on your portable rig. Game Longer and Better Optimize peak performance in gaming mode and monitor your drive’s health with the WD_BLACK Dashboard so you can game with confidence.
Upgrade Your Rig. Elevate Your Game. Get into the action now with the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD. This purpose-built gaming drive boasts a PCIe Gen4 interface that delivers blazing speeds of up to 5,150MB/s (1TB and 2TB models). First into the Action Get into the match fast as you zoom past load times with blazing speeds of up to 5,150MB/s2 (1TB and 2TB models). Smoother, Faster Gaming Improve in-game responsiveness and streaming with the PCIe Gen4 interface for a performance boost you can see and feel. The interface is compatible with leading CPU and motherboard platforms and backwards-compatible with PCIe Gen3. Store More Available in capacities up to 2TB, the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD gives you tons of storage for your latest games with space left over for future updates and downloadable content. Turbocharge Your Laptop Get up to 20% more power efficiency at maximum speed over the previous generation (1TB model) for an even better overall gaming experience on your portable rig. Game Longer and Better Optimize peak performance in gaming mode and monitor your drive’s health with the WD_BLACK Dashboard so you can game with confidence.
Upgrade Your Rig. Elevate Your Game. Get into the action now with the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD. This purpose-built gaming drive boasts a PCIe Gen4 interface that delivers blazing speeds of up to 5,150MB/s (1TB and 2TB models). First into the Action Get into the match fast as you zoom past load times with blazing speeds of up to 5,150MB/s2 (1TB and 2TB models). Smoother, Faster Gaming Improve in-game responsiveness and streaming with the PCIe Gen4 interface for a performance boost you can see and feel. The interface is compatible with leading CPU and motherboard platforms and backwards-compatible with PCIe Gen3. Store More Available in capacities up to 2TB, the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD gives you tons of storage for your latest games with space left over for future updates and downloadable content. Turbocharge Your Laptop Get up to 20% more power efficiency at maximum speed over the previous generation (1TB model) for an even better overall gaming experience on your portable rig. Game Longer and Better Optimize peak performance in gaming mode and monitor your drive’s health with the WD_BLACK Dashboard so you can game with confidence.
Last updated at 06/08/2026 17:51:51
Western Digital SN770 250GB Gen4 NVMe SSD, Black
Affiliate Disclosure: We may receive a small commission for purchases made through this link at no extra cost to you. This helps support our site. Thank you!
WD Black SN770 WDS250G3X0E 250GB NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen4 SSD
Western Digital Black SN770 250GB Gen4 NVMe SSD 4000MB/s 2000MB/s R/W 200TBW [WDS250G3X0E]
Free delivery between Thu – Mon
originally posted on bestbuy.com
I replaced my older PCIe Gen 3 WD SN750 with this, the WD SN770. The biggest difference is the sheer speed of the new SSD and how incredibly fast everything boots and loads! Installation was very easy, as most SSDs tend to be, with only needing to remove the old drive from the Gen 4 slot and install the new drive in the opposite order. I installed this into my Alienware x17r1 laptop which has a Gen 4 slot where the original boot drive was. The rest of the setup is pretty straightforward, you can either choose to use this as a blank secondary storage drive or restore you boot drive to it (I cloned mine over so as not to lose any of my existing data). The initial speed difference in boot time is just unreal! NVMe SSDs already are blazing fast if you're coming from a ... MoreI replaced my older PCIe Gen 3 WD SN750 with this, the WD SN770. The biggest difference is the sheer speed of the new SSD and how incredibly fast everything boots and loads! Installation was very easy, as most SSDs tend to be, with only needing to remove the old drive from the Gen 4 slot and install the new drive in the opposite order. I installed this into my Alienware x17r1 laptop which has a Gen 4 slot where the original boot drive was. The rest of the setup is pretty straightforward, you can either choose to use this as a blank secondary storage drive or restore you boot drive to it (I cloned mine over so as not to lose any of my existing data). The initial speed difference in boot time is just unreal! NVMe SSDs already are blazing fast if you're coming from a HDD, but this was almost twice as fast as the SN750 it replaced! The older drive has been repurposed as game storage for those larger games on the market, but the new drive holds quite a few games, too! Where the speed really shines is in Adobe Premiere Pro, in conjunction with a lot of RAM, the render and loads times are almost unnoticeable now and pulling game and video clips from storage is lightning fast!Overall, I would definitely recommend this drive in either of its storage sized to gamers looking to almost eliminate loads times and content creators looking for an extra blast of speed at a pretty reasonable price point!
originally posted on bestbuy.com
The WD Black SN770 is an excellent choice to upgrade an older/smaller solid state drive or a hard drive. Write speeds are great for storing and accessing data like photos and videos. Performance wise, this drive is well suited for nearly all storage cases but seems to perform especially well for video editing and accessing applications from. I used this to upgrade my boot drive from a smaller 256 GB drive (gen 3) to this. Even if your motherboard only supports gen 3 this drive still is blazing fast and will still work with it and the write speeds are definitely improved over the last generation of drives.Upgrading yourself is not too difficult in most desktops and laptops. First check to see if your motherboard has an NVME slot and if it has a drive. If it does, ... MoreThe WD Black SN770 is an excellent choice to upgrade an older/smaller solid state drive or a hard drive. Write speeds are great for storing and accessing data like photos and videos. Performance wise, this drive is well suited for nearly all storage cases but seems to perform especially well for video editing and accessing applications from. I used this to upgrade my boot drive from a smaller 256 GB drive (gen 3) to this. Even if your motherboard only supports gen 3 this drive still is blazing fast and will still work with it and the write speeds are definitely improved over the last generation of drives.Upgrading yourself is not too difficult in most desktops and laptops. First check to see if your motherboard has an NVME slot and if it has a drive. If it does, and you only have one slot, there's an easy way to deal with that by either cloning the drive to a hard drive (which requires a lot more steps) or grab an NVME USB adapter. With the adapter simply boot in to windows and clone the existing NVME drive to the new on mounted with the USB adapter, then swap the drives once completed. There are plenty of guides on how to do it on YouTube and Best Buy's geek squad can also do this for you and probably not for much more than buying the adapter with a lot less effort!For me, once the upgrade was complete, loading programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator seem to load slightly faster than they did before and skipping through videos in preview was noticeably faster on 4k videos recorded with my phone. I'd definitely recommend this upgrade, especially if you have a hard drive or a smaller boot drive and you do a lot of media editing or consumption.
originally posted on bestbuy.com
The SN770 is my second m.2 SSD from the WD Black line, since I got the SN850 for my desktop PC last year. I use my laptop primarily for gaming and do a bit of video and image content creation on it as well, so I needed a storage upgrade with fast read and write speeds to handle these applications. The SN770 fit the bill in all respects while still remaining budget friendly. It's basically plug-and-play, after installing the drive in an open m.2 NVMe slot in my laptop, though you will have to initialize, partition, and format the drive in Windows before it can be used. I cloned my primary drive to the SN770 with Acronis True Image, which took only a few minutes, then replaced it with the newly bootable SN770.In a PCIe 4.0 slot, the SN770 was consistently able to ... MoreThe SN770 is my second m.2 SSD from the WD Black line, since I got the SN850 for my desktop PC last year. I use my laptop primarily for gaming and do a bit of video and image content creation on it as well, so I needed a storage upgrade with fast read and write speeds to handle these applications. The SN770 fit the bill in all respects while still remaining budget friendly. It's basically plug-and-play, after installing the drive in an open m.2 NVMe slot in my laptop, though you will have to initialize, partition, and format the drive in Windows before it can be used. I cloned my primary drive to the SN770 with Acronis True Image, which took only a few minutes, then replaced it with the newly bootable SN770.In a PCIe 4.0 slot, the SN770 was consistently able to achieve read and write speeds over 4500 MB/s. While the drive lacks DRAM and uses an SLC cache, it can sustain peak write speeds continuously up to around 400 GB of written data before dropping off to lower speeds of about 500 MB/s. Still, unless you're constantly writing large amounts of data, this drive should cover most typical consumer activities like gaming, streaming, and creative work without encountering any stuttering or throttling. I found I was able to render and save 4K video content to the drive in a very reasonable amount of time.This drive can be installed in older generation PCIe slots as well for example PCIe 3.0, however, its performance will be capped at that generation’s speed (around 3500 MB/s read and write). This drive does not have an onboard heatsink, though you can add an aftermarket one to lower the operating temps to extend the life of the drive. I found that typical temperatures with game mode turned off under usage was around 45 - 55 °C even without a heatsink. Under heavy load testing with game mode enabled, the temps can run into the mid to high 70s, but the drive continued to perform well in that range without noticeable speed throttling.Overall, I think this drive is a very good mid-tier, budget-friendly upgrade for gaming storage and enhancing everyday computing use, including content creation. It delivers fast read and write speeds from both PCIe gen 3 and 4 m.2 slots, and is easy to install and set up.
| Device Type | Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) |
| Used For | Consumer |
| Form Factor | M.2 2280 |
| Capacity | 250GB |
| Interface | PCIe Gen4 16GT/s, up to 4 Lanes |
Western Digital SN770 250GB Gen4 NVMe SSD, Black
Affiliate Disclosure: We may receive a small commission for purchases made through this link at no extra cost to you. This helps support our site. Thank you!
WD Black SN770 WDS250G3X0E 250GB NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen4 SSD
Western Digital Black SN770 250GB Gen4 NVMe SSD 4000MB/s 2000MB/s R/W 200TBW [WDS250G3X0E]
Free delivery between Thu – Mon
I replaced my older PCIe Gen 3 WD SN750 with this, the WD SN770. The biggest difference is the sheer speed of the new SSD and how incredibly fast everything boots and loads! Installation was very easy, as most SSDs tend to be, with only needing to remove the old drive from the Gen 4 slot and install the new drive in the opposite order. I installed this into my Alienware x17r1 laptop which has a Gen 4 slot where the original boot drive was. The rest of the setup is pretty straightforward, you can either choose to use this as a blank secondary storage drive or restore you boot drive to it (I cloned mine over so as not to lose any of my existing data). The initial speed difference in boot time is just unreal! NVMe SSDs already are blazing fast if you're coming from a ... MoreI replaced my older PCIe Gen 3 WD SN750 with this, the WD SN770. The biggest difference is the sheer speed of the new SSD and how incredibly fast everything boots and loads! Installation was very easy, as most SSDs tend to be, with only needing to remove the old drive from the Gen 4 slot and install the new drive in the opposite order. I installed this into my Alienware x17r1 laptop which has a Gen 4 slot where the original boot drive was. The rest of the setup is pretty straightforward, you can either choose to use this as a blank secondary storage drive or restore you boot drive to it (I cloned mine over so as not to lose any of my existing data). The initial speed difference in boot time is just unreal! NVMe SSDs already are blazing fast if you're coming from a HDD, but this was almost twice as fast as the SN750 it replaced! The older drive has been repurposed as game storage for those larger games on the market, but the new drive holds quite a few games, too! Where the speed really shines is in Adobe Premiere Pro, in conjunction with a lot of RAM, the render and loads times are almost unnoticeable now and pulling game and video clips from storage is lightning fast!Overall, I would definitely recommend this drive in either of its storage sized to gamers looking to almost eliminate loads times and content creators looking for an extra blast of speed at a pretty reasonable price point!
The WD Black SN770 is an excellent choice to upgrade an older/smaller solid state drive or a hard drive. Write speeds are great for storing and accessing data like photos and videos. Performance wise, this drive is well suited for nearly all storage cases but seems to perform especially well for video editing and accessing applications from. I used this to upgrade my boot drive from a smaller 256 GB drive (gen 3) to this. Even if your motherboard only supports gen 3 this drive still is blazing fast and will still work with it and the write speeds are definitely improved over the last generation of drives.Upgrading yourself is not too difficult in most desktops and laptops. First check to see if your motherboard has an NVME slot and if it has a drive. If it does, ... MoreThe WD Black SN770 is an excellent choice to upgrade an older/smaller solid state drive or a hard drive. Write speeds are great for storing and accessing data like photos and videos. Performance wise, this drive is well suited for nearly all storage cases but seems to perform especially well for video editing and accessing applications from. I used this to upgrade my boot drive from a smaller 256 GB drive (gen 3) to this. Even if your motherboard only supports gen 3 this drive still is blazing fast and will still work with it and the write speeds are definitely improved over the last generation of drives.Upgrading yourself is not too difficult in most desktops and laptops. First check to see if your motherboard has an NVME slot and if it has a drive. If it does, and you only have one slot, there's an easy way to deal with that by either cloning the drive to a hard drive (which requires a lot more steps) or grab an NVME USB adapter. With the adapter simply boot in to windows and clone the existing NVME drive to the new on mounted with the USB adapter, then swap the drives once completed. There are plenty of guides on how to do it on YouTube and Best Buy's geek squad can also do this for you and probably not for much more than buying the adapter with a lot less effort!For me, once the upgrade was complete, loading programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator seem to load slightly faster than they did before and skipping through videos in preview was noticeably faster on 4k videos recorded with my phone. I'd definitely recommend this upgrade, especially if you have a hard drive or a smaller boot drive and you do a lot of media editing or consumption.
The SN770 is my second m.2 SSD from the WD Black line, since I got the SN850 for my desktop PC last year. I use my laptop primarily for gaming and do a bit of video and image content creation on it as well, so I needed a storage upgrade with fast read and write speeds to handle these applications. The SN770 fit the bill in all respects while still remaining budget friendly. It's basically plug-and-play, after installing the drive in an open m.2 NVMe slot in my laptop, though you will have to initialize, partition, and format the drive in Windows before it can be used. I cloned my primary drive to the SN770 with Acronis True Image, which took only a few minutes, then replaced it with the newly bootable SN770.In a PCIe 4.0 slot, the SN770 was consistently able to ... MoreThe SN770 is my second m.2 SSD from the WD Black line, since I got the SN850 for my desktop PC last year. I use my laptop primarily for gaming and do a bit of video and image content creation on it as well, so I needed a storage upgrade with fast read and write speeds to handle these applications. The SN770 fit the bill in all respects while still remaining budget friendly. It's basically plug-and-play, after installing the drive in an open m.2 NVMe slot in my laptop, though you will have to initialize, partition, and format the drive in Windows before it can be used. I cloned my primary drive to the SN770 with Acronis True Image, which took only a few minutes, then replaced it with the newly bootable SN770.In a PCIe 4.0 slot, the SN770 was consistently able to achieve read and write speeds over 4500 MB/s. While the drive lacks DRAM and uses an SLC cache, it can sustain peak write speeds continuously up to around 400 GB of written data before dropping off to lower speeds of about 500 MB/s. Still, unless you're constantly writing large amounts of data, this drive should cover most typical consumer activities like gaming, streaming, and creative work without encountering any stuttering or throttling. I found I was able to render and save 4K video content to the drive in a very reasonable amount of time.This drive can be installed in older generation PCIe slots as well for example PCIe 3.0, however, its performance will be capped at that generation’s speed (around 3500 MB/s read and write). This drive does not have an onboard heatsink, though you can add an aftermarket one to lower the operating temps to extend the life of the drive. I found that typical temperatures with game mode turned off under usage was around 45 - 55 °C even without a heatsink. Under heavy load testing with game mode enabled, the temps can run into the mid to high 70s, but the drive continued to perform well in that range without noticeable speed throttling.Overall, I think this drive is a very good mid-tier, budget-friendly upgrade for gaming storage and enhancing everyday computing use, including content creation. It delivers fast read and write speeds from both PCIe gen 3 and 4 m.2 slots, and is easy to install and set up.
My Acer Nitro latpop was running out of memory, so I was on the hunt for more space. With so many different options, brands, etc. it was a bit difficult choosing the right one. I read through forums, reviews, and just about anything else that could lead me towards the right direction.The opportunity came up to get my hands on the new D_BLACK SN770 1TB Internal PCIe Gen 4 x4 Solid State Drive, and I jumped on it. With the great reputation that WD's Black series memory devices has, and the countless numbers of great reviews, this solid state drive does not disappoint.On my Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop, things get a bit more complicated when wanting to do internal mods. This is the newer model that did not have the small popout compartments, so I had to take the ... MoreMy Acer Nitro latpop was running out of memory, so I was on the hunt for more space. With so many different options, brands, etc. it was a bit difficult choosing the right one. I read through forums, reviews, and just about anything else that could lead me towards the right direction.The opportunity came up to get my hands on the new D_BLACK SN770 1TB Internal PCIe Gen 4 x4 Solid State Drive, and I jumped on it. With the great reputation that WD's Black series memory devices has, and the countless numbers of great reviews, this solid state drive does not disappoint.On my Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop, things get a bit more complicated when wanting to do internal mods. This is the newer model that did not have the small popout compartments, so I had to take the bottom half of the laptop off in order to get the D_BLACK SN770 1TB Internal PCIe Gen 4 x4 Solid State Drive in. On an actual desktop pc, it would have been SO MUCH easier. At least if would have had I installed it in my Aurora R7. Aside from that, installation is simple.Now for the good part... the D_BLACK SN770 1TB Internal PCIe Gen 4 x4 Solid State Drive is incredible! The writing speeds are super fast! You have to love solid state drives... no noise or any of the drawbacks of hard disk drives. The D_BLACK SN770 1TB Internal PCIe Gen 4 x4 Solid State Drive has been extremely reliable and stays pretty cool.For the money, you cannot beat the D_BLACK SN770 1TB Internal PCIe Gen 4 x4 Solid State Drive. I would highly recommend it to anyone in the market for more memory.
I recently got a new gaming pc that came with a 512Gb PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe Solid state drive installed. I knew this would be inadequate storage so I wanted to upgrade to a larger drive. I also wanted to upgrade to a faster drive when I discovered that my motherboard actually supported a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe. I’ve used Western Digital hard drives for nearly 20 years so I was eager to try the the WD Black SN770 NVMe SSD for this upgrade. Spec wise WD promises 5150MB/sec read speeds and up to 4900MB/sec write speeds. The SN770 is also backward compatible with PCIe Gen 3.In the box you find the SN770 and some paperwork. I do wish these NVMe drives came with the post screw because you will need one if this is for a secondary NVMe slot. Since I was upgrading my existing drive ... MoreI recently got a new gaming pc that came with a 512Gb PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe Solid state drive installed. I knew this would be inadequate storage so I wanted to upgrade to a larger drive. I also wanted to upgrade to a faster drive when I discovered that my motherboard actually supported a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe. I’ve used Western Digital hard drives for nearly 20 years so I was eager to try the the WD Black SN770 NVMe SSD for this upgrade. Spec wise WD promises 5150MB/sec read speeds and up to 4900MB/sec write speeds. The SN770 is also backward compatible with PCIe Gen 3.In the box you find the SN770 and some paperwork. I do wish these NVMe drives came with the post screw because you will need one if this is for a secondary NVMe slot. Since I was upgrading my existing drive I opted to just clone my existing drive to the SN770. So I popped the SN770 in my secondary slot temporarily for the cloning process. Western Digital has a free version of Acronis True Image cloning software available at their website which makes this process easy. The most difficult part of the installation process is fumbling with the tiny post screw. I’ve learned that a magnetic screwdriver designed for these screws helps considerably.Since my secondary slot is PCIe Gen 3 I could benchmark the SN770 in PCIe3 and I got 2680 read and 2460 write speeds. I then moved the SN770 to my PCIe Gen 4 slot. Here I got twice the speed at 5224 read and 4968 write speeds. Fantastic. I was thrilled. Immediately I the speed increase was noticeable with faster boot times and my games loaded far faster than with my PCIe3 drive.Make sure to get the WD SSD Dashboard software from the WD site. Here you can monitor drive capacity and performance. You can also view drive temperature and drive life remaining. You can also use the dashboard to check for firmware updates and do diagnostic tests. I particularly was interested in the game mode which disables low power mode for the ssd which should reduce latency for gaming while activated. Gameplay just felt perkier with this SN770. That’s what it’s all about. I was pleased. I would recommend.
This hard drive worked perfectly in my laptop. I was needing to add some additional storage to my gaming / graphic design laptop, and this hard drive filled this need quite well.Installation was quick and easy. It was a simple matter of opening up my laptop, inserting this drive at about a 45 degree angle into the appropriate slot, pushing downward to seat it fully into the slot, and then using a small screw to hold it into place.My laptop recognized it right away, and I was able to rename and format it using Windows Disk Management utility.The drive is fast, and my games load quite quickly. Being a solid state drive, it doesn't impact my battery life as badly as a traditional, spinning hard drive would. This is good as I like to work from coffee shops, and I ... MoreThis hard drive worked perfectly in my laptop. I was needing to add some additional storage to my gaming / graphic design laptop, and this hard drive filled this need quite well.Installation was quick and easy. It was a simple matter of opening up my laptop, inserting this drive at about a 45 degree angle into the appropriate slot, pushing downward to seat it fully into the slot, and then using a small screw to hold it into place.My laptop recognized it right away, and I was able to rename and format it using Windows Disk Management utility.The drive is fast, and my games load quite quickly. Being a solid state drive, it doesn't impact my battery life as badly as a traditional, spinning hard drive would. This is good as I like to work from coffee shops, and I don't always have ready access to an electrical outlet.1TB of space offers plenty of room for both a handful of casual games and the image assets that I need for my design work. I installed my graphic design applications on my boot drive, and I use this drive to store my background images, logos, and project files.I wish the drive were just a bit bigger, as I'm probably going to fill this within the next year or so. When that happens, I'll probably either replace this with a higher capacity drive or supplement it with an external hard drive.I am quite pleased with this hard drive and would recommend it to anyone looking for some fast, secondary storage.
I wanted to put this in a brand new gaming laptop but it turns out that there is only one slot and that is taken up with the main SSD. I briefly thought about flashing that stuff over to this SSD but I'm not sure that it would be worth the effort. That being said, I did find a great use for this SSD and it is arguably a better use for it than the gaming PC.I do a lot of educational lessons that utilize a ton of multi-media. I create the lessons, materials, teacher instruction, and scan/digitize primary sources. I then take those lessons and give them to teachers at conferences all around the nation. For a lot of lesson materials, a regular USB 'thumb' drive might be OK, but I have had problems in the past with having to run these presentations off of the thumb ... MoreI wanted to put this in a brand new gaming laptop but it turns out that there is only one slot and that is taken up with the main SSD. I briefly thought about flashing that stuff over to this SSD but I'm not sure that it would be worth the effort. That being said, I did find a great use for this SSD and it is arguably a better use for it than the gaming PC.I do a lot of educational lessons that utilize a ton of multi-media. I create the lessons, materials, teacher instruction, and scan/digitize primary sources. I then take those lessons and give them to teachers at conferences all around the nation. For a lot of lesson materials, a regular USB 'thumb' drive might be OK, but I have had problems in the past with having to run these presentations off of the thumb drive.**Lesson to those who create pretty much anything and then present such items: Always run your material from your own computer or external drive. You would be surprised how many venues, schools, and businesses have a policy of claiming ownership or unlimited usage of anything that is loaded onto their computers or servers.**I found a brand new external enclosure for NVMe drives that is getting rave reviews and easily installed and initialized the drive. After loading up ALL of my materials that I am currently using, I was able to get almost 3x the speed of my USB 3.2 thumb drive! Now if I give presentations, I can use this drive and if there are any hangups, it will be on their side and not mine!When looking for a great PCIe drive that gives you awesome speed and value, you really can't beat the Western Digital SN770.
If your pc or laptop has an extra port and you game, you need to buy this! If you are building a new computer, you need to add this to your cart! If you are looking to upgrade your existing PCIe internal hard drive, you need to run to the store now!Technology has surely come around with hard drives. This bad boy ties right into your PCs mother board allowing for higher speeds and a direct connection to not only you're gaming but anything you want with the advantage of speed. Depending on your pc's port if it is gen 3 or gen 4 will factor in this devices speed. To get up to the high speeds of 5150mb/sec read and 4900mb/sec read speeds you will need to have a motherboard capable of gen 4. I did confirm that the SN770 is backwards compatible to gen 3 although it is a ... MoreIf your pc or laptop has an extra port and you game, you need to buy this! If you are building a new computer, you need to add this to your cart! If you are looking to upgrade your existing PCIe internal hard drive, you need to run to the store now!Technology has surely come around with hard drives. This bad boy ties right into your PCs mother board allowing for higher speeds and a direct connection to not only you're gaming but anything you want with the advantage of speed. Depending on your pc's port if it is gen 3 or gen 4 will factor in this devices speed. To get up to the high speeds of 5150mb/sec read and 4900mb/sec read speeds you will need to have a motherboard capable of gen 4. I did confirm that the SN770 is backwards compatible to gen 3 although it is a gen 4. This was stated on the box. This SSD is catered to gaming however is great for other applications like graphic design and photography. I have adobe photoshop which I typically edit tons of photos. Using it along with this SSD was great as there was minimum loading times. Photos usually take forever to download and transfer on any computer but having my laptop equipped with this device makes it a little bit more bearable as my download speeds increased and the time, I wait decreases!Installation took me about 15 minutes on my laptop. I verified first that my laptop was equipped with a PCIe gen 4 x4 slot and to my surprise on my research I found that my laptop is equipped with two! One slot was already equipped (OEM) so I added this little guy in my 2nd PCIe slot. Most laptops/desktops only have one PCIe slot for a SSD so i recommend checking what you have and what you need to do prior to purchasing. If you are swapping out your exiting PCIe SSD you might be taking your OS with you when taking it out and might need to make some transfers. I recommend googling if you need to learn more about swapping your primary hard drive.For the value you get speed and a sizable amount of space (1TB but there are other higher options).
If you spend any time researching, you'll see that the more recent batch of M2 drives can be a little hit or miss - especially from some of the less-know brands. I'm happy to say that the SN770 hits that perfect sweet spot between awesome performance, and affordable price.Note that this drive does NOT include a heatsink, so whatever environment you're planning to use it in make sure you have suitable protection (ventilation, heatsink , thermal pad etc). In my scenario this is the perfect portable extension for my M1 MacBook Air for either a quick transfer or large audio files, and alternatively as a backup before I head out on the road.The spec of the drive states that it can read at a whopping 5150MB/s and read a 4900MB/s , but as always there is a caveat here. ... MoreIf you spend any time researching, you'll see that the more recent batch of M2 drives can be a little hit or miss - especially from some of the less-know brands. I'm happy to say that the SN770 hits that perfect sweet spot between awesome performance, and affordable price.Note that this drive does NOT include a heatsink, so whatever environment you're planning to use it in make sure you have suitable protection (ventilation, heatsink , thermal pad etc). In my scenario this is the perfect portable extension for my M1 MacBook Air for either a quick transfer or large audio files, and alternatively as a backup before I head out on the road.The spec of the drive states that it can read at a whopping 5150MB/s and read a 4900MB/s , but as always there is a caveat here. That is the theoretical maximum for the drive itself, and its highly likely your method of connection will be the bottleneck.If you're connecting this directly to an M2 slot on the motherboard, then assuming the controller is spec'd for M.2 2280, you should be getting full-speed-ahead. However if you're like me and you're connecting it as an external drive (via ThunderBolt3) you mileage will vary greatly based on the enclosure / connection.For example I tried this in an OWC Envoy express, and that maxed out at around 1500MB/s which is ok , but not great. I picked up an Orico M2 TB3 enclosure for about $5 more than the Envoy and it reads/writes at almost double the speed.So if you're looking for a cost effective storage expansion, look no further than the SN770 - your only question should be what size.I received this item at no charge as part of a technical evaluator program, but all the opinions/test/conclusions in this review are all mine.
INTROThe Western Digital SN770 is the latest WD / SanDisk entry into what I would consider the mainstream NVMe SSD market. I say mainstream because there are parts of the drive that exude premium / high-end features, like its amazing throughput and things that make it seem more entry-level, like its DRAM-less configuration.I’m sure there are many of you, who like me, who remembers the days of horrible performance from DRAM-less SSD’s, especially DRAM-less SATA SSD’s. Manufacturer’s cut corners to get the cost of their drives down. While they succeeded in reducing costs, they also succeeded in reducing the performance of the drive and making the user experience painful, sometimes nearly as sad as an old school 5400 rpm drive.Those of us that worked on and ... MoreINTROThe Western Digital SN770 is the latest WD / SanDisk entry into what I would consider the mainstream NVMe SSD market. I say mainstream because there are parts of the drive that exude premium / high-end features, like its amazing throughput and things that make it seem more entry-level, like its DRAM-less configuration.I’m sure there are many of you, who like me, who remembers the days of horrible performance from DRAM-less SSD’s, especially DRAM-less SATA SSD’s. Manufacturer’s cut corners to get the cost of their drives down. While they succeeded in reducing costs, they also succeeded in reducing the performance of the drive and making the user experience painful, sometimes nearly as sad as an old school 5400 rpm drive.Those of us that worked on and upgraded computers during this time, quickly learned the hard way how important a properly designed and implemented cache system is to a drive. But, like everything else, times change. This go ‘round, Western Digital, changed the game. This is the 1st DRAM-less drive I’ve used that is as good, or better than any other DRAM equipped drives on the market. So much so, I would easily recommend this drive up against my Samsung 970’s and 980’s. Whoa!! Wait! What??SYSTEM CONFIGURATIONMy test rig is modest Asus Zenbook 15. It has an 11th generation Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM. In my testing, the only thing that hampered the WD 770 was the laptop’s PCIe Gen 3.0 x 4 interface.After installing the drive, I proceeded to install a fresh copy of Windows 11, all the latest updates from Microsoft, including drivers, and the Western Digital Dashboard. The Dashboard is WD’s version of the Samsung Magician software. It monitors drive parameters, including SMART status, temps, writes, reads, etc. The WD Dashboard is slick looking, but still lacks the overall polish and refinement that the Magician software brings to the table.The 770 is fast! The limiting factor in the drive’s performance is the PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe interface of my Asus. Even with the prior generation’s specs, the Asus managed impressive results. Using the AS SSD benchmarking software, I recorded speeds as follows:Sequential Read: 2686 MB/sSequential Write: 2454 MB/sRandom Access Times of less than .03ms.Excellent performance. The drive is speedy and responsive.Again, while these numbers are not Earth shattering, it is merely the limitations of the laptop’s motherboard. This WD 770 is capable of speeds exceeding 5100 MB/s. Those speeds were unheard of just a short time ago.DRAM-Less DesignLike I stated earlier, this is the first DRAM-less drive that I would recommend to PC enthusiasts, be they gamers or content creators. How did WD achieve these impressive results? Pouring through a few white papers and internet reviews, revealed that the WD drive utilizes the system’s Host Memory Buffer (HMB). In a nutshell, the drive uses a small portion of the computer’s RAM as its own. This helps to dramatically increase throughput and IOPS.Western Digital did a great job at optimizing this drive’s firmware. I replaced a 500GB Intel Optane drive with this WD 770. Even though the Optane drive had 32GB of Optane memory for DRAM, this WD 770 makes it look bad. There was absolutely nothing I tried that didn’t work quicker or snappier on the WD 770. Whether it be application launching, browsing, content creation, content rendering, gaming, etc. it all seemed much snappier and the laptop overall happier with the Western Digital drive. I was never once able to completely fill the cache to where the drive slowed. Though I don’t have the software to officially measure it, the drive always seemed to recover from heavy use very quickly.NEGATIVESThe only real negative that I can think of regarding this drive is that because its firmware relies on the host’s HMB to cache, it makes it unsuitable, or less than suitable for the PS5, as it has no provision to utilize its own memory as the DRAM. I’m not sure how this would ultimately impact the drive’s performance in a PS5, though on paper the WD does meet the minimum specs for use.FINAL THOUGHTSThis 770 is a great drive. Though not quite as fast as my beloved Samsung 980 Pro, it has fully changed my mind about how a DRAM-less drive performs. If only all drives performed as well as the 770, life would be much better. While my 980 Pro overall performs better than my 770, there is one thing that the 980 can’t, or doesn’t compete with; price. At this price point, I would have no reservations buying a WD 770 over a 980 any day of the week. Add to this a solid 5 year warranty and this drive is a no-brainer.HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
| Device Type | Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) |
| Used For | Consumer |
| Form Factor | M.2 2280 |
| Capacity | 250GB |
| Interface | PCIe Gen4 16GT/s, up to 4 Lanes |
