trs96
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WD Black SN770
If you want a hackintosh boot drive with plenty of space, no TRIM compatibility issues and a good price, you've come to the right Deal of the Day. Nothing else can compete with this in regard to price/performance. Best for use as your hackintosh boot drive. I'm pretty sure everyone wants to avoid the bouncing dock icons and a spinning macOS beach ball
Using a new M.2 NVMe drive is the best way to avoid this.3-14-23 The price of the 1TB version has come down to $59.99 as of today. Must select Amazon as the seller.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QV692XY/?tag=tonymacx86com-20 The 500GB edition sells for $35.40.
If the above price doesn't show up after clicking the link. Go to the Other Sellers on Amazon section which is at the lower right side of the page. Find Sold by: Amazon.com for the $59.99 price. Add to Cart.
The 1TB drive option costs less per GB than a 2TB SN770 drive. That means you can buy one SN770 NVMe drive for Windows and one for macOS if you are a dual booter. It's best to keep each OS on it's own drive. If Windows doesn't need the extra space, get just a 500GB NVMe to save even more money.
Here's some general info on this PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive from WD. Note the Random Read and Write IOPS.
These will work in all motherboards with an M.2 PCIe slot. Doesn't matter if it's PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 it's compatible.
Use it in a desktop or your laptop. You may want to attach a heatsink or a thermal pad for use in a laptop.
All SN770 drives are backed by a five-year warranty. WD now owns SanDisk and uses their NAND Flash. It's because of the proprietary WD controller that these are ideal for use as a macOS boot drive. Samsung's own Phoenix and other controllers are what makes them problematic with macOS.
The 2,000 GB drive has endurance of 1,200 TBW. You'll have long since upgraded before writing 1,200 TB to it. The one TB drive has a 600 TBW rating which should also offer plenty of SSD life for most users.
The PC Mark 10 chart ranks all the best drives in terms of real world performance. Crystal Disk Mark shows you how fast Sequential reads/writes are. That's not meaningful in terms of overall everyday use scenarios. CDM shows how fast you can read and copy large files. Not what you'll be doing most of the time on your hackintosh. You'll be running and working in specific applications. If you also game, will 7,000+ MB/s sequential read and write speeds of a 990 Pro make any real difference in games ?
If you are into gaming in Windows or macOS you'll notice that the SN770 benchmarks even better than the new Samsung 990 Pro. This is hard to believe when you consider that the 990 Pro 1TB costs 105 dollars more as of this posting. No reason to pay that much extra just for 80 points more in the PC Mark 10 Full Benchmark. You need a fast and reliable NVMe SSD for your macOS boot drive. You've likely heard about the problems with TRIM and the Samsung NVMe drives that became common with the public release of macOS Monterey. The 990 Pro doesn't have a firmware fix for these. Best to save your money and avoid using it with macOS.
Easy to see that the SN770 1TB is the better choice. No slow boot-time (TRIM) issues to deal with. Has a good warranty from a reputable company and top tier performance in the areas that matter most for a boot drive. It even out-performs the 980 Pro model from Samsung in overall performance ! The non-Pro 980 comes in at only 468 in PC Mark 10. You could opt for the WD Blue SN570 and get nearly as good performance for less money. Should you pay more and get the WD SN850X ? I'd say no unless you have a Z690 motherboard and work the drive excessively hard. That's where having a DRAM cache is important. Saves a lot of wear and tear on the NVMe NAND flash.
What is a DRAM Cache on an SSD ?
SSDs, as you may already know, don’t have any moving parts. They store data into something called the NAND flash. SSDs contain one or more NAND flash chips into which data is written and rewritten as per CPU’s instruction. SSDs also use something called Data map tables to track where the data is saved in NAND to read, move, or rewrite them as needed.
DRAM-less SSDs store these tables in the NAND itself. However, if an SSD has DRAM in it, it stores these tables in DRAM leading to better data management, faster speeds, and longevity. The existence of DRAM is not exclusive to any SSD form factor. All form factors like 2.5 inch, M.2, and even NVME SSDs have models that may or may not have DRAM in them.
Make sure the seller is Amazon.com and not a third party.
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