This 2TB WD Black SN770 NVMe SSD is just £87 from Amazon
A great price on a capacious and capable SSD
We might well be seeing SSD prices rise, but that hasn't stopped retailers and manufacturers mark them down to palatable levels. For instance, one of the better value options in terms of price to performance, the WD SN770 is available for a solid price from Western Digital directly. At the moment, it's available for £110, which is a useful reduction on its £138 list price.
The SN770 has certainly been one of the best gaming SSDs of the last few years, offering snappy speeds and solid random performance to allow for quick load times so you can get into games quicker. For reference, WD says the SN770 offers speeds of up to 5150MB/s reads and 4900MB/s writes, respectively, as well as quoted IOPS figures of 740,000 and 800,000 random read/writes. While these speeds are solid for PC use, they fall a smidgen short of Sony's stringent requirements for the PS5 - 5500MB/s read/writes. You can still theoretically use a slower drive such as the SN770 in the PS5 without that much of a performance penalty, though, as our research into slower drives has shown, although you will need a heatsink. Luckily, these are dime a dozen in terms of cost and availability - in the past, we've recommended this respectable £8 option.
If you want to steer clear of potentially small performance penalties though, and you want to use the SN770 in your PC, you'll just have to make sure your motherboard is capable of supporting PCIe 4.0. To save you the hassle of looking it up, any motherboard from the last four or so years should be okay, but just check your specific model and chipset to see what it supports. If you're building a new system, then you'll also find that we've seen motherboards come down in price a fair bit in the last few months, which is handy. Installation of the SN770 should also be nice and easy, with a single screw to secure the drive into place, while there are also countless YouTube tutorials should you need them.
It's also worth noting that with 2TB of capacity, the SN770 is going to provide you with a lot of space on which to install games, media and all sorts of other stuff. It's always useful to have more storage, and the SN770 will provide you with a decent amount of it - its quick speeds make it a great choice to use for a boot drive or as a game drive if you've got a large Steam library. PC users can also utilise WD_BLACK Dashboard, Western Digital's companion software for their drives to boost performance when in gaming mode and also allows you easy access to the drive's vitals.
This WD Black SN770 2TB model for £110 from Western Digital represents quite the great deal if you want to get some great solid-state storage to add to a PC for speedy performance in a good capacity.