A quality gaming PC won’t perform at its best with a HDD or SATA SSD. Modern games demand high performance storage for things like seamless level transitions, long draw distances and high definition textures. Then there are the simultaneous demands of Windows itself and dozens of background programs accessing your storage. You need a high performance SSD to keep your system performance smooth, and the WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD is perfect for just this scenario.
Adding a WD_BLACK SN770 to your system will deliver tangible responsiveness. Programs and games will load faster than with a hard drive or SATA SSD. It may even seem like you have an all-new PC.
The WD_BLACK SN770 is available in sizes ranging from 250GB up to 2TB. This means there’s a capacity to suit most people and rigs, whether you’re looking for something small for a laptop, or a comprehensive game library on your desktop PC. And, unlike many of its competitors, Western Digital designs and builds its SSDs in-house. That means all of its components including the controller, flash memory and firmware are designed and optimised from the ground up to work together.
Admittedly, you don’t buy an SSD based on its looks, but there’s no denying that the SN770 is a fine-looking piece of kit. Its all-black look and subtle fonts will easily blend into almost any gaming system, whether you use RGB lighting or not.
PCIe 4.0 performance at PCIe 3.0 prices
Ever since they were launched, PCIe 4.0 SSDs have tended to carry a premium price to go along with their high-end performance. However, now that they’re well established in the market, things are changing. A high performance PCIe 4.0 drive doesn’t need to carry the steep price associated with many of the established models. For the price of a PCIe 3.0 drive, the WD_BLACK SN770 delivers the awesome performance of a fast PCIe 4.0 drive.
The WD_BLACK SN770 includes the latest Western Digital developed controller and NAND flash memory. It delivers speedy sequential, random and IOPS performance compared to the best last-gen PCIe 3.0 drives. It’s designed to meet the needs of a modern gaming system, delivering the performance that matters.
What to look for in a gaming SSD
When you read about the specifications of an SSD, your attention will be drawn to the headline sequential read and write speeds. But there’s more to an SSD than that. If you see a drive with a 7,000/6,500 MB/s read and write speed, and another with a 5,500/5,500 MB/s read and write speed, you might think that the second drive was slow in comparison. But, that’s certainly not the whole picture. To be fair, higher sequential speeds do play a part, but they’re more relevant when moving large single multi-GB files, such as a 4K video.
For gaming, sequential speeds can be considered secondary to random read speeds and in/out operations per second. It’s these characteristics that deliver the responsiveness, low latency and reactive performance that a gamer needs. This is the area where the SN770 excels, making it an excellent choice for a gaming system.
Why are these characteristics important? When you’re in-game, the game itself, along with background programs, are all constantly reading and writing little bits of data. It’s important that your game doesn’t get interrupted by these drive accesses, ruining your immersion. The last thing you want is stuttering, freezing or delays, such as a tree or grass popping up unexpectedly as the result of a storage bottleneck. You want to minimise level loading times too. There’s nothing worse than looking at a spinning hourglass while something is loading. With random read and write speeds of 740K IOPS for the 1TB model, and 800K IOPS for the 2TB drive, the WD_BLACK SN770 is powerful enough to meet the demands of gamers, without breaking your gaming experience.
Performance is nothing without reliability
High performance is a fantastic thing to have, but it doesn’t mean much if you lack reliability. The SN770 comes with a five-year limited warranty and an endurance rating of up to 600 Terabytes written (TBW) for the 1TB model or 1,200 TBW for the 2TB model. This means you can rest easy knowing you can download hundreds of Gigabytes every day for years.
Western Digital makes it easy for you to monitor the health of your drive with the easy to use WD_BLACK Dashboard. This simple to use and intuitive software tool allows you to keep an eye on the health, temperatures and performance of your drive at any time.
Many modern PCIe 4.0 drives get a bit hot. A lot of them come with heatsinks, which breaks compatibility with most laptops and more than a few motherboards. The WD_BLACK SN770 doesn’t require a heatsink for normal operation. You can use it without experiencing throttling in most systems, including laptops. Of course, its low profile means it's easily compatible with integrated motherboard heatsinks.
Sitting in the price and performance sweet spot
Again, it’s important to emphasise that sequential speed isn’t as important for gaming as random performance with small files is. It’s accessing these files that matters the most, and when looking at the performance of the SN770 in this context, it’s competitive with any drive on the market, including those that cost a lot more.
The SN770 is a smart choice for any gaming system. It delivers excellent responsiveness that’s perfect for gaming. Plus, you get a five-year limited warranty, low temperature operation, great software support, and of course, terrific value.
A WD_BLACK SN770 is definitely a drive worth considering for your next rig upgrade.
Grab one right here, and start to enjoy the speed and performance of the WD_BLACK SN770 SSD.
