Model: Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 1TB NVMe Solid State Drive
Manufacturer: Western Digital
Provided By: Western Digital
As one of the biggest names in the storage industry, Western Digital doesn't need much of an introduction. Founded in 1970, the company got its start by manufacturing calculator chips. As time went on, Western Digital expanded into the PC market, adding floppy and hard disc controllers to its product lineup. It wasn't until 1988 that it introduced its "Centaur" series of hard drives. Since then, the company has grown to become the world's second largest manufacturer of hard drives. Western Digital currently offers a wide range of internal and external hard drives as well as a growing number of multimedia devices, SSDs and network storage solutions.
Earlier this year, Western Digital's unveiled the latest addition to its line of WD_BLACK NVMe SSDs, the SN770. Designed for use in PC gaming rigs, this compact, M.2 form factor SSD is powered by Western Digital's own 20-82-10081-A1 controller and is available with up to 2TB of the company's 112-layer BiCS5 3D TLC NAND flash. The WD_BLACK SN770 is also equipped with an PCIe Gen4 x4 interface to deliver ultra-fast read speeds of up to 5,150MB/s to fuel in-game responsiveness, minimize stutter, and provide smooth streaming for a performance boost that gamers can see and feel. Last, but not least, users can customize and control their gaming experience with the downloadable WD_BLACK Dashboard software.
The WD_BLACK SN770 is available in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities. For this review, Western Digital sent us the 1TB version of the drive, which is capable of delivering up to 5,150 MB/s sequential read and 4,900 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 740,000 random read and 800,000 random write IOPS.
Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the WD_BLACK SN770 has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at Western Digital's new PCIe 4.0 SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the WD_BLACK SN770 have what it takes? Can it deliver the performance and features that we've come to expect from Western Digital? Keep reading as we find out.
