WD Black SN850X vs SN850 vs SN770 SSD - Which SSD Should You Buy?

A little bit over 2 years ago I bought a WD Black SN850 500GB, and I can tell you that it has been a fantastic drive. I did test the speeds when I got it, and it was as fast as advertise: now 26 months later, I get around 5900MB/s sequential read & 4100MB/s sequential write. Drive can get hot sometimes, and I get throttling once every 2-3 days (I bought the w/o heatsink version btw) so my guess its around the sweet spot.

Thank you for your video and comparisons. This information will help me make the right purchase.

I went with an SN850X 4TB and an Acidalie SSD/M.2 2280 VB01 Heatsink. SN850X works very well with heatsink!!😀. The ambient temperature was 20°c/68°f and the SN850X, with heatsink, it had an idle temp of 38°c/100.°f. Without any heatsink the SN850X 4TB idle temp was 42°c/108°f.... On full load, the temps went to 61°c/141°f with heatsink...

Great video mate!

Thanks for this great video

The SN770 is actually extremely good in a system with a fast cpu and DDR5 ram which makes up for the lack of dram in some situations, in some benchmarks it even beats the Samsung 980 Pro. For light and medium read/write tasks (like 95% of workloads) this thing shreds. Unless you're a professional video editor or a game developer where every minute matters the SN770 is all you need. The SN770 also works great for the PS5, even PCI-Express Gen 3 SSDs run well on PS5 and have barely 5% slower load times than the PS5's internal SSD.

Today, I purchased a 4TB SN850X for $286 USD! I am in the process of acquiring parts to build a PC, and I simply could not pass that deal up! Especially consider I was wanting 4TB of storage, so I was just going to settle for getting two 2TB SN770s for a fairly similar price. I am so excited lol!

Already have one installed but let's see!

Best Buy had the 2TB SN850X w/ heatsink for $142. Bought it in a heartbeat.

Thank you for the breakdown! Really helped me make a choice. 850X 2TB for $180 currently. Not too shabby.

Thanks for the video , really helpful 👍 I’m going to give my 1TB w/heatsink to my bro for the PS5 and buy for myself a 2TB 850x 🎉

Great comparison... but what about heat generation between the different technologies? Does it also mean: More speed, more data = more heat?

Just went for two SN770 for gaming on PC. You really won't see any difference and sequential speeds are just marketing for 99% of users 😉

just bought a 4tb sn850x, it was on sale on amazon for $259. At that price, it pretty much is the Go to drive.

KC 3000 and KC review please and thank you 🙏!!

Awesome video! Thanks for sharing. Which do you recommend for someone like myself running this as an external SSD for my M2 Mac Mini which I’ll be using primarily for music creation in a DAW. Somewhere to run my VST plugins and work song projects from as I prefer to minimize all storage usage on my internal ssd and only store the DAW’s main program there along with what’s necessary to be stored on the computers internal ssd.

Bought the sn770 last year to upgrade my os drive, didnt see a lick of a performance increase. I had a 870 evo before, and that had vnand cache. Good thing I only use it for my os, Im too invested to upgrade or switch drives either. Ill continue to add storage, but going with a good gen 3 drive before I ever buy a nasty dramless ssd.

@NASCompares - currently I have 2x 4TB WD RED SN700 in my Qnap tbs-464. I just want to add 2 more SSD (to have raid5) . Originally I planned 2 more WD red sn700 , but because they are pci-Gen3 , I think about additional maybe SN850x . Of caurse I'm aware that tbs-464 only handle pci-gen3x2 so SN850x would not be fully used ... but presumably (most likely) next gen of tbs-464 will be able to use pci-gen4 . So what's your suggestion : stick with WD RED SSD line ..? or invest in SN850x ..? (of course SN850 has lower TBW but that not a problem in my case .. I will not plan to upload so many TBs of data..)

Hey there good vid, i have a question, currently i have a 1tb sn850 as OS drive and a 4tb hdd for storage, i plan on getting a 2tb sn850x since its on sale, should i bother making the 850x as OS drive or just leave it for AAA games and continue using the 850 as OS drive? would I notice much difference using the 850x as boot drive over the 850? sorry if its a confusing question, keep up the good work!

I just got the sn850x 2tb for $90 from newegg, great sale price