WD Black SN770M 1 TB NVMe SSD review

PC gaming has always had a bit of a tenuous history when it comes to the portability of its endeavors. The fact is that for the longest time those same chips that powered our high-end gaming desktops were just too hungry to be baked into a handheld gaming console. Flash forward to the launch of the Steam Deck though, (sorry Elgato), and at last we finally have an absolute armada of new handhelds entering the fray. All of them priced aggressively, kitted out with enough top-tier hardware to make for an engaging and enjoyable gaming experience on the move. But, there’s a caveat, as there often is, and it comes in the form of storage.

It’s one of those things right? If you don’t have enough of it in your gaming PC, it sucks. You’re constantly battling, deleting, re-downloading, perpetually anxious about your new games failing on the install. Manufacturers being the way they are, typically don’t include large drives in their handhelds either. That’s where Western Digital’s WD_Black SN770M 1TB comes into the picture.

It was perhaps unsurprising given the success and flurry of handhelds making their way into the arena, that we also wouldn’t be greeted with an arsenal of SSDs to back them up. After all a number of us may have mistakenly held back the cash and picked up a cheaper 512GB or worse still 256GB Steam Deck on launch, and well with a few installs, likely saw that little red bar demand you delete some of your hard earned games before installing more.

But you know all that, it’s been some time since the Steam Deck first launched, (in fact the Steam Deck OLED’s landed since then, albeit still with a PCIe 3.0 SSD) so the better question is, now that time has passed and there’s an array of these M.2 2230 drives out there in the wild, is Western Digital’s legendary black line, particularly in the form of its SN770M 1TB, still as competitive as it was before?

Capacity: 1TB
Interface: PCIe 4.0 x4
Memory controller: Sandisk 20-82-10081-A1
Flash memory: Kioxia 112-layer TLC