Final Thoughts
When you think of WD Black drives you think of some of the best and highest performing drives out there. But with the more mainstream adoption of Gen4 NVMe solid state drives Western Digital has really expanded the WB Black line to have a value and price-oriented drive that is also targeted at gamers. That is not to say that this drive is not fast, with advertised speeds of 5150 MB/s read and 4900 MB/s write it is no slouch in the performance department. In our testing we saw read and write speeds of 5199.67 MB/s and 4964.77 MB/s in CrystalDiskMark and 4990 MB/s and 4620 MB/s in ATTO Disk Benchmark. With these speeds you’ll definitely notice faster boot up and load times compared to a SATA-based drive and even a Gen3 NVMe drive.
Another thing that is impressive about this drive is that it does have a DRAM-less design. Typically when we see DRAM-less drives that make use of Host Memory Buffer (HMB) tech they really take a hit on extended write performance, but that is not the case with this drive. In our linear write test we saw solid performance till about 40% of the drive was full and after that performance dropped slightly till about 76% full and that is when performance took a real hit.
As I said this drive is all about price and right now you can pick up the 1TB version for $114.99, which is pretty aggressive for a Gen4 drive in this performance level. Of course Western Digital backs the drive up with a 5 year warranty as well. Overall ThinkComputers gives the WD Black SN770 Gen4 NVMe Solid State Drive a 9 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!
Pros:
– Great overall performance
– Good extended write performance for a DRAM-less drive
– 5 year warranty
– Aggressive pricing
– SSD Toolbox software
Cons:
– Not the fastest Gen4 drive out there
