PCIe 4.0 drives are coming down in price fast, and nowhere is this more evident than with Ebuyer’s recent sale on the WD Black SN770 2TB drive. It normally costs £190, but this has dropped to £170 today. That’s an awesome deal on a high speed PCIe 4.0 drive that works on both PC and PS5 and hits the current sweet spot for bulk storage.
The WD SN770 2TB debuted earlier this year, with the RPS SN770 review coming out in February. Technoking James reckoned that the drive was ‘just short of SSD greatness’, citing the drive’s high price compared to models that had been on the market longer – such as the budget WD SN550 and the super-fast WD SN850. However, those judgements were rendered based on a 1TB price of £144 – so now you’re getting double the capacity for £36 more, and I reckon that changes the calculus somewhat! For perspective, the SN770’s debut 2TB price was £250, so this is a solid £80 reduction over that figure – not bad.
Elsewhere in the SN770 review, James acknowledges the drive’s excellent performane. It’s rated for sequential reads and writes of up to 5150MB/s and 4850MB/s, respectively, and James saw similar numbers in his real-world testing of the 1TB model despite some slower-than-expected results in some synthetic benchmarks – perhaps to be expected from a DRAM-less drive. He continues:
The Black SN770 can be blazingly fast in the right conditions, including when loading games. Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s Cozumel mission loaded from the Black SN770 in a scant 9.39 seconds, a full second faster than the Black SN750 SE and even a couple of blinks faster than the Black SN850. It also posted an excellent write speed result, 3352MB/s, in CrystalDiskMark’s 8 queue/8 thread random benchmark. That’s faster than both of its WD stablemates as well as the Samsung 980 Pro, another higher-end PCIe 4.0 SSD. Its 236.6MB/s result in the AS SSD 4K write test is also one of the highest I’ve got on record.
So with the major issue over pricing solved, I reckon this is an absolute slam-dunk recommendation. This drive won’t be as consistently fast as the WD SN850, a higher-tier option, but it is still an incredibly rapid drive for the money – and to get a 2TB model for £170 is just awesome.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below, and stay tuned for more deals very shortly!