Get the WD Black SN770 1TB for £75 (was £91) Get the WD Black SN770 1TB for £140 (was £181)
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.