WD Black SN770M SSD review – an essential upgrade for your Steam Deck

One of the biggest obstacles I’ve faced with platforms like my Asus ROG Ally Z1 Extreme or Valve’s trusty Steam Deck is storage. Between downloading triple-A games and useful apps or dabbling in emulation, the factory standard SSD fills up quickly. The WD Black SN770M can stretch your storage means up to a considerable 2TB and has completely dispelled all my portable gaming worries.

Many of the best portable gaming consoles offer SD card ports, but sometimes that tiny piece of plastic isn’t enough to get the job done. In some instances, it can actually be cheaper to opt for some proper hardware. After suffering the wrath of the dreaded and infamous Asus ROG Ally SD card frying issue, I knew it was time to get the precision screwdrivers out. Western Digital kindly provided a 1TB variant of the SN770M, and I purchased the 2TB out of my pocket for comparison’s sake.

Typically, the 1TB version retails for $59.99/£59.99, while the jump to 2TB increases the price to $104.99/£104.99. Having gone through plenty of SSDs and HDDs for laptops and consoles like the PS4 and PS5 in the past, Western Digital’s offerings comfortably sit in a mostly affordable space.

Packaged in a simplistic black box, these M.2 2230 SSDs are compact and suitable for your preferred portable consoles or your desktop. It isn’t anything to brag about aesthetically, but in action, I quickly forgot about life before this SSD arrived. As these SSDs are PCIe Gen 4 drives, they’re capable of reaching read speeds of up to 5,150 Mbps. There are faster options out there, like the Lexar Play 2230 or the PS5-compatible WD Black SN850X, but I’ve found this to be the sweet spot for gaming on the go.  Western Digital also bundles in a five-year warranty, though you probably won’t have to use it.

Putting the tiny yet mighty piece of kit into your handheld PC may seem daunting, and I understand if you’d be weary of tinkering with your Steam Deck or Lenovo Legion S.

To put your mind at ease before you consider upgrading your storage, let me assure you that it’s a very painless experience, and you can do it in less than ten minutes. The SN770M is practically identical to the stock Micron SSD in a Steam Deck or ROG Ally in terms of form factor, eliminating the need for me to mess around with any additional heat sink tweaks. Removing the shell of any handheld console is arguably the hardest part, as the screws can be somewhat troublesome. Extracting an SSD is bliss by comparison.

For those of you looking to beef up your Steam Deck, both drives will take full advantage of the handheld’s PCIe Gen 3 capabilities, while Gen 4 speeds are wholly experienced on Asus’s machine. That’s aided by the SNN07M’s Microsoft DirectStorage support, meaning that any Windows desktop or handheld benefits from faster loader times purely because of the API. To see what the SNN07M’s gritty details were, I opted to use Novabench. Sequential read speeds maxed out at 5,004 Mbps – just shy of Western Digital’s 5,150 Mbps claims – with sequential write speeds capping at 4,413 Mbps. The latter is especially useful for filling your console with lots of lovely games.

Downloading tons of the best Steam Deck games doesn’t feel quite as taxing, as balancing performance with making way for FPS games like The Finals or open-world game juggernaut Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t drag down my overall experience. Flexing between applications is snappier, which is ideal for jumping between multiple game launchers if you’re not too keen on the ROG Ally’s Armory Crate feature. It’s a notable difference from the stock Micron 2400 512GB SSD bundled with the ROG Ally.

The WD Black SN770M has a lot of competition to face off against, but at a price point this strong, with plentiful storage options, the upgrade is too hard to ignore. If you’ve recently acquired a Steam Deck or one of its rivals, this SSD is an essential upgrade you won’t regret.

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