Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 2TB PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe M.2 2280

The SN770 2TB is a fast DRAM-less Gen4 drive with great random performance and a solid warranty. But user sentiment is terrible, with multiple reports of boot loops and partition corruption when used as an OS drive. Buy it cheap as a game library drive, skip it as your boot drive.

Sequential reads land at 5,150 MB/s and writes at 4,850 MB/s. That puts speed in the 75th percentile, which is well above average but not top of the charts. Random performance is where this drive shines, with 650K read IOPS and 800K write IOPS landing in the 90th percentile. That's a standout for game load times and file transfers. The catch is the DRAM-less design. Under sustained heavy writes, the drive leans on HMB and can hit thermal throttling territory. Several owners mention slowdowns when the drive gets hot, especially in tight laptop bays or without airflow.

Against the Samsung 9100 Pro, the SN770 gets smoked on sequential speed and feature set. The Crucial T500 beats it on sustained writes thanks to its DRAM cache. The Kingston Fury Renegade is faster across the board and more consistent under load. The Corsair MP700 Elite is a different class entirely, PCIe 5.0 territory. Where the SN770 wins is price. When it's on sale, it undercuts most of these competitors by a meaningful margin. But you're trading reliability and sustained performance for that savings. For a boot drive, the SN850X is the WD_BLACK you actually want.

Pricing is all over the place. In the US, you'll see this drive listed anywhere from $288 to $400 across three listings. That's a $112 spread for the exact same 2TB drive. If you're buying, shop around and don't pay the high end. The best US deal in our data comes from Newegg. In Canada, the spread is even wilder, CAD 595 to CAD 1,315. At the low end, this is a solid value for a 2TB Gen4 drive with this endurance rating. At the high end, you're overpaying for what is ultimately a mid-pack performer with reliability question marks.

The WD_BLACK SN770 2TB is a DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 drive that hits 5,150 MB/s reads and 4,850 MB/s writes. On paper, that's a solid mid-pack Gen4 performer with a 5-year warranty and 1,200 TBW endurance. For gaming and secondary storage, it's a genuinely good pick.

But here's the thing. Our user sentiment data puts this drive in the 6th percentile for owner satisfaction. That's rough. A handful of buyers report boot loops, BIOS failures, and partition corruption when using it as a Windows OS drive. As a game library drive, it's great. As your main boot drive, it's a gamble.

Skip this if you need a reliable boot drive. The pattern of boot loops and partition corruption is too consistent to ignore. Also skip it if you do heavy sustained writes, video editing, or large file transfers all day. The DRAM-less design will bottleneck you. And if you're building in an Alienware R13, check compatibility first, several owners have reported issues there.

Buy this if you need a fast 2TB game library drive and you find it at the low end of the price range. It's genuinely quick for loading games and moving large files, and the endurance rating is solid. But do not make this your Windows boot drive. The reliability complaints are too consistent to ignore. If you need a primary OS drive, spend the extra money on something with DRAM and a cleaner track record.