The test system used in this review is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 3700x CPU, MSI B550 GAMING PLUS motherboard, 16GB (8GB x 2) of Crucial Ballistix 3200 MHz DDR4 memory, Crucial P5 1TB SSD and a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card. For the operating system, I used the latest version of Windows 10 Pro.
To test the performance of Western Digital's WD_BLACK SN770 SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark. For comparison, I've also included test results from the ADATA XPG ATOM 50, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade, Crucial P5 Plus, Plextor M10PY, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, WD_BLACK SN850, Silicon Power US70, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite, Samsung 980, Silicon-Power UD70, Crucial P2, SK hynix Gold P31, Crucial P5, ADATA SWORDFISH, ADATA FALCON, Lexar NM610, Silicon Power P34A60, Patriot P300, Plextor M9PG Plus, Plextor M9PY Plus, ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro, Western Digital WD_BLACK SN750, Lexar NQ100, Samsung 970 EVO Plus, ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro, Crucial P1, ADATA XPG SX8200, Western Digital WD_BLACK NVMe, Samsung 970 EVO, Samsung 970 PRO, Plextor M9Pe, Plextor M8Se, Patriot Hellfire, ADATA XPG SX8000, Samsung 960 PRO, Toshiba OCZ RD400, Samsung 950 PRO, Samsung 870 EVO, Samsung 870 QVO, Silicon Power PC60 and SK hynix Gold S31.
As I mentioned earlier, the WD_BLACK SN770 uses Western Digital's new 20-82-10081-A1 controller chip. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that it performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential and random read and write speeds. For this test, we're using the peak and real world profiles.
According to Western Digital, the 1TB WD_BLACK SN770 is capable of reading at 5,150 MB/s and writing at 4,900 MB/s. As you can see, the drive had no problems reaching these speeds in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write tests.
As you'd expect, the WD_BLACK SN770 wasn't as fast when tested with the "real world" profile which uses a single thread and a much lower queue depth. Nevertheless, it was still able to read at 4,862 MB/s and write at more than 4,900 MB/s.
HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0:
Next, I used HD Tach to test the WD_BLACK SN770's read, write and burst speeds as well as its random access time and CPU usage.
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the WD_BLACK SN770 had average read and write speeds of 1373.6 MB/s and 1305.8 MB/s respectively, as well as a burst speed of 3006.2 MB/s. The screenshot also shows that it uses some sort of SLC caching. The drive starts writing at about 2,600 MB/s and then drops to about 600 MB/s when the write operation exceeds the size of the cache.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the WD_BLACK SN770's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 512B to 64 MB and the total length set to 256MB.
 WD_BLACK SN770 1TB |
 ADATA XPG ATOM 50 1TB |
When tested with ATTO, the WD_BLACK SN770's read speeds topped out at about 4.61 GB/s and its write speeds at 4.90 GB/s.
