Almost Perfect! - WD Black SN770 Gen4 SSD Review

so western digital is launching their brand new gen 4 ssd uh the wd black sn770 and this drive is basically supposed to replace the sn750se uh that was always pretty cheap but it wasn't really impressive for a gen 4 ssd so if this new drive manages to perform better while maintaining that low price it could become one of the better value drives on the market so let's check it out this video is brought to you by seasonic and their prime series power supplies these top quality power supplies are very efficient they're whisper quiet extremely reliable and my go-to choice for most of my test rigs and builds around here and to make the deal even sweeter seasonic wraps it all up in a cozy 12 year long warranty check them out using the links in the description below now unfortunately western digital isn't really open about the technical details of this drive there is no spec sheet yet and the only information provided is you know pretty basic so we can see it's a pci gen4 drive that the capacities will range from 250 gigabytes to 2 terabytes and that you'll get a five year long warranty with the mean time to failure of about 1.75 million hours now they don't mention what kind of a flash memory it has but it makes sense that it's a tlc drive and they also don't mention hardware encryption but considering that neither the sn850 nor the sn750 had it it is fair to assume that this drive won't have it either but just looking at it you can see that this drive is pretty basic so in this one terabyte model uh there are only a controller and a single flash module and this makes it look more like the western digital blue sn570 than the fancy wd black sn850 but that isn't also necessarily a bad thing because it means that it's probably not that expensive to make it and that makes it more affordable for the end user this drive does not have a heatsink included but you do get a black pcb which does look much nicer than the blue one but i have to say it is painful to see that the sticker is not on straight now i know it's a completely stupid thing to complain about but it is the first thing you see when you open the package and at least to me it just gives me a bad vibe and a bad first impression now it might not be as relevant to everyone but i bet i'm not the only one that finds this slightly unacceptable i mean it cannot be that hard to put a sticker on straight anyway let's move on to some more important things and see how this drive actually performs as usual i'm going to start with my pc mark 10 benchmarks because they can so easily explain all kinds of different use cases even to people that are not that into ssds and don't really know where to begin and the pc mark 10 quick test replicates all those simple little things that we do with our pcs that are not that heavy on the ssd so those are the things like working with documents working with photos and even playing games and this is a great test for anyone that wants to add a second ssd to their system for those simple tasks and the sn770 is on the top of the graph beating the sn850 and every other gen 4 ssd in this test by a margin and this is not a mistake we actually run this test several times to make sure it's correct uh including the tests done after stressing the drive and after filling it with more data so it just handles these sort of scenarios really well it's also showing the lowest latency result meaning it is just really quick to access whatever is on the drive now i'm not entirely sure what is causing this uh either the memory that western digital is using is somehow a lot faster than the other drives we tested or it has some excellent firmware optimization going on so i have no idea what it is but it is definitely working now the full pc mark 10 suite is a test that is a bit more intense and it is meant to replicate more serious and more active use of your system and the drive itself and this is usually a very good test to look at if you plan to use this as your main drive or if you plan to run some heavier applications and the sn 770 is basically sharing the first place here with the kingston kc3000 it is ahead of the sn 850 as well as any other gen 4 ssd for that matter and it then beats all of them if you just look at the latency now interestingly enough uh wd included this test in their own documentation with the result of 541 megabytes per second of bandwidth and they were using an 11 900k ddr4 3200 memory and windows 10 but with my 12900k ddr5 5200 and windows 11 it actually does a lot better now in the pc mark 10 consistency test we can finally see some limitations keep in mind that this is a very extreme multi-hour long stress test so it's not something most people should be looking at it is more for anyone that is looking to buy an ssd for very storage intense workloads like working with really high quality video files or with proper workstation tasks and here the sn770 gets overtaken by almost every other gen 4 ssd and even some gen 3 ones so i would say do not buy this drive for any sort of hardcore professional use now another area where this drive is a bit limited is the sequential read and write performance and this is likely a result of them deciding to use a single flash chip so both read and write speeds that end up just under 5000 megabytes per second which is far from slow but it is still in the middle of the pack result it also kind of complicates the use of this ssd in a playstation 5 for example so sony's recommendation is that the drive needs to have read speeds of at least 5500 megabytes per second and i kind of assumed that they're mentioning that number because most ssds only ever market that single sequential performance which still says very little about the actual quality of the ssd itself considering how good the latency results are of this sn770 it should be a great option for a game console but it's still hard to straight up recommend it it might be working completely fine now but i don't know how it will cope with future games and future updates and i don't really want to be the person responsible for you running into any issues in the future so i would still just listen to sony and go for something else if you're looking to update a storage on your playstation 5. now as i said in my gen 4 ssd roundup all gen 4 ssds can get hot and you do want to think about cooling no matter which drive you end up buying but this drive is actually one of the cooler gen 4 ssds i've tested so far and it's typically running at about 60 degrees or less during light workloads and that is testing it without a heatsink on an open test bench and with no extra airflow for reference the sn850 easily hit 9200 degrees here without cooling but during those longer tests this drive did go up to around 85 degrees celsius on the controller and at that point you can run into some thermal throttling so if you don't do anything too intense so you can be fine without a heatsink but in my opinion you should consider getting one anyway especially if you're putting it somewhere without good airflow so any recent motherboard should come with a heatsink included but if yours doesn't have it for whatever reason you can always get a decent one from amazon for a couple of dollars i'm gonna put some suggestions and some links in the description down below and you can check it out so overall i have to say i really like this drive its predecessor the sn750se really wasn't more than a gen 3 drive in a gen 4 coat but they clearly put a bit more effort in this one and it actually ended up doing really well in those light to medium heavy tasks so for gaming for storage for photos and even as a boot drive this sn770 should be a great choice but if you're looking for a drive for those heavier tasks i would still say it's better to go for something else now if you need any suggestions you can always check my gen 4 roundup video i'll leave a link down below there are two more things that i would like to mention before we end this video the first one is that you need to know that smaller capacities do not perform as well as one or two terabyte models especially when they rely on a single memory chip and one and two terabyte drives will probably make more sense from a price per gigabyte perspective but if for some reason you still want to go for a smaller one the performance might differ from what you see in this video and the second thing the second thing is more of a general concern that i would like to share with you because it's good to know now they don't specify which flash memory they're using so there's always a risk of them changing it in the future which might result in a different performance plus that also kind of did happen before so even though i truly hope that that won't be the case i will leave the exact numbers of the controller and the memory of my drive in the comments down below so we can you know compare it to some future drives as well uh now that's it for today thank you so much for watching this video and staying till the end if you like this video and you want to see more please do consider subscribing and if there are any other ssds that you would like me to look at please let me know in the comments down below bye guys and see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Techtesters

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Id: AKhuivHREG0

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 02 2022