The excellent SN770 SSD is going cheap at the WD UK store

The WD Black SN770 is a rather lovely PCIe 4.0 SSD, offering sequential speeds up to 5150MB/s at a surprisingly low price. The drive was dubbed ‘just short of SSD greatness’ on its debut earlier this year, but price drops have brought it increasingly into contention.

Today, for example, you can pick up the 1TB model from WD’s official UK web store for £75, down from £91, or the larger 2TB size for £140, down from £181. That beats the Amazon price considerably, especially for the 2TB size which is currently at £178.

So: the SN770. As mentioned above, 5150MB/s refers to the max read speeds, while sequential write speeds are up to 4850MB/s. That’s good for copying very large files rapidly, with speeds that are only slightly behind the very fastest PCIe 4.0 drives which max out at around 7000MB/s, but the lack of a DRAM cache means that sustained speeds aren’t as strong as higher- grade drives like WD’s own SN850.

Of course, sequential speeds aren’t the best determiner of load times, that’s more down to random reads. The SN770 is actually pretty handy here thanks to its PCIe 4.0 controller and TLC NAND, with random read speeds rated at 740K IOPS – about three quarters of the fastest drives available. That should translate into excellent load time and boot time performance, and indeed in our testing it outperformed even the SN850 in our Shadow of the Tomb Raider load time test.

Given that the biggest issue with the SN770 identified in our review was its price, the recent reductions make it a pretty solid pickup.