If you have a PC that supports PCIe 4.0, then you may want to grab your hands on the WD Black SN770. This NVMe SSD is just S$80 for 1TB, and features blazing fast read speeds of up to 5,150MB/s. This makes it perfect for gaming with faster load times.

That's not to say the write speed is shabby, either. You get 4,900MB/s write speeds. Though I noticed peak write of around 2.3GB/s when moving folders between my drives. It's still pretty fast, though. Of course, this NVMe isn't as fast as say, the WD Black SN850, but it's a lot faster than the previous WD Black SN750E I tested two years back.

Like the SN750E, the SN770 doesn't come with DRAM. It probably isn't an issue if you're doing a lot of work that involves data workloads. Having tested this for a bit, I'm pretty confident you won't have issues using this as a gaming drive for games such as Diablo IV. Note that you can't use this to upgrade your PS5 storage. The PS5 needs at least 5,500MB/s sequential read speeds.

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While this SSD doesn't come with a heatsink, you won't need it. Even when gaming, the PC's internal temperature sensors told me it was running at just 65°C. That's relatively cool and well below the 85°C operating limit. If your motherboard comes with a heatsink, you can use that, though I think it's not needed. I want to point out that the 500GB and 250GB speeds are slower. Our tests were done on the 1TB version. The 2TB model has similar performance.

At S$80 to S$109, the WD Black SN770 NVMe SSD is a seriously cheap upgrade for your current rig. To be clear, this is last year's model, but still good enough. If you want a slightly faster drive, the 1TB WD PC SN810 is about S$50 more and has sequential read speeds of 6,600MB/s. Get the SN770 from Amazon (cheapest at S$80), Shopee, or Lazada.

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Note: Review unit provided by Western Digital.