WD Black SN770 Overview
Taking a first look at the drive it is your standard M.2 2280 (80mm) drive and Western Digital has gone with a black PCB. You will notice there is no heatsink on the drive and there is not one included so you’ll have to rely on your motherboard’s M.2 heatsinks to keep the components on the drive cool. In the center of the drive there is a small sticker that has the model number, serial number, and capacity. It is interesting that what is shown on the box (a large sticker across the entire drive, is not what you find inside.
Before we get into the components on the drive if we flip the drive over we can see that it is single-sided, which will make this drive ideal for thin and light devices as well as consoles.
When it comes to components on the drive we have the controller, a single NAND package, and smaller chip in between the two. Western Digital is making use of an in-house SanDisk controller, which we really don’t know that much about, but we do know it is a 4-channel controller. WD tells us the drive has advanced thermal management technology that helps maintain consistent performance.
The single NAND package is BiCS5 112-Layer TLC. There is no DRAM chip on the drive, which means the drive will make use of Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology which will access up to 64 MB of your system’s RAM.
