HONESTLY, that strapline is perhaps the best summation this journalist has ever written for a product. Western Digital’s Black SN770M is designed with one thing in mind: to massively expand your handheld device’s storage. Yep, we’re talking Steam Decks, Asus ROG Allies, and the numerous new devices launching at CES and Computex this year. The handheld PC has arrived, this time with more graphics and minuscule amounts of internal storage. We bet SSD manufacturers are counting their lucky stars regarding the latter.
Here we have Western Digital’s WD Black SN770M PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD, and it is seriously tiny. It’s the M.2 2230 form factor, and comes in at 29.97 x 22.1 x 2.29mm. It’s also available in capacities ranging from 500GB all the way up to 2TB, and to be honest is impressively priced too, ranging from $80 for the 500GB variant, all the way up to $220 for the 2TB model. Ours comes in at $110, giving you 9.17 GB per $ spent, which for a PCIe 4.0 drive of this caliber (and form factor, for that matter) is incredibly well positioned in the market.
As for per formance, it holds its own. WD has it listed at sequential reads of 5,150 MB/s and 4,900 MB/s. In our testing Cr ystalDiskMark 8 topped that, clocking 5,222 and 4,968 respectively. AS SSD was a little less forgiving, clocking 4,550 and 3,818 on sequential read and write, but nonetheless is well within parameters for a solid PCIe 4.0 drive. Access times also performed at the top tier level, clocking in a svelte 0.017 ms for both read and write, even pipping the Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 12000 on the Write access. We suspect that this is down to the design of the drive itself. Given the compact nature of this thing, having both the memor y controller and a single NAND chip sat so close to one another should minimize read and write request times considerably, as the drive doesn’t have to go searching as far as some of the other drives in our test-bed, giving it an advantage over longer SSDs.