That would appear to be identical to the 740 on offer from Framework.
Sorry for the late reply, but thank you very much for the clarification!
Yeah, the Western Digital SN770M appears to be identical to the Western Digtial SN740, spec wise.
Western Digital SN740: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/pc-sn740-nvme-ssd/product-brief-pc-sn740-nvme-ssd.pdf
Only difference I see is that the 770 appears to have 2x the TBW for the 2GB model.
Any thoughts on this Micron 2230 2TB SSD?
https://www.newegg.com/micron-2tb-2400-series/p/0D9-0022-000N1
…can’t go wrong with Micron although I wonder why it isn’t branded Crucial.
Note this is not an official endorsement, just my opinion. I don’t have an FW16 so I can’t test but there should be no reason why it wouldn’t work.
I think Micron often brands products as Micron when they plan to primarily sell it to OEMs (although in many cases they do still allow customers to buy it) whereas they brand products as Crucial when they plan to primarily sell it directly to customers.
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Hi,
Many suggestions about SSDs are based on reputable brands, price, capacity and speed, but what about self-encryption capability?
Are there any options for M.2 2230 SSDs supporting hardware-based full-disk encryption?
I know most Crucial/Micron SSDs are OPAL 2.0+ compliant but do you know any other similar manufacturers?
Information on this topic appears to be scarce between vague datasheets and different naming…
Thanks in advance for your suggestions !
In the 2230 size the larger WD SN770’s have longer TBW than the 740’s and scale proportionally with size rather than incrementally. i.e. The 0.5, 1 and 2 TB sizes the 740’s have TBW of 300, 400 & 500 while the 770’s have TBW of 300, 600 & 1200.
See https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb/products/internal-drives/pc-sn740-ssd?sku=SDDPTQD-1T00 and WD_BLACK™ SN770M NVMe™ M.2 2230 SSD | Western Digital
The 770’s are also a tiny fraction thinner than the 740’s: 2.29mm vs 3.38mm.
Endurance is important for me so I think I’ll drop the 740 from my pre-order and source a 770 independently. I’m planning on using a 1TB 2230 for the OS and programs and a 4TB 2280 for data storage. Depending on prices I find close to delivery time I might even consider a 2TB 770 2230.
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I am going to use this:
https://www.newegg.com/team-group-2tb-mp44/p/N82E16820985041
Seems pretty affordable and capable. If it works well with the steam deck, it should work fine here.
While reading the post, I became a bit worried: I would like to use samsung 990 pro 1TB (https://www.alza.sk/EN/samsung-990-pro-1tb-d7516911.htm?o=2). Will I be able to chuck it on top of the WD drive installed from factory or should I rather just order the SSDs in order not to face the compatibility issues?
2230 means it has a length requirement of 30mm. What you have is a 2280, which is 80mm. Framework said there were size constraints, so I am not sure if you can use the 2230 port without damaging the ssd, or other parts of the laptop. You could try to see if the M.2 Expansion bay is available or something. Just assume you can only use one 2280 regular M.2 ssds.
The official word is that a 2230 and a 2280 drive can be used together, provided that they are both single sided. There is a bit of conjecture around potential heat issues though…
I am aware of the fact I can have only one 2280 ssd but my question was mostly targeted towards the height requirement.
You would need to find out if the SSD you wish to use is single-sided. If it is, then it should be fine. If it’s double-sided then you’d need the exact bottom side height, which may not be easy to find. It’s possible that the manufacturer may not even publish the exact bottom side height.
See Height limitations when using double-sided SSD for Primary Storage
The picture certainly looks single-sided, but I wouldn’t rely on that myself. They could potentially reuse pictures for different models.
~edit~
After googling a bit, it seems to be single-sided. You might want to check yourself though.
Just bought this one as Black Friday deal for my FW16, it says it is single-sided so I hope it is fine ;).
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I did get this drive and tested it. It’s real (full 2 TB working), and during the test, actual speeds are 600 MB/s reads, 350 MB/s writes. That’s sequential and after running out of the SLC cache. I’m sure I killed a 1/4 of it’s life by running these tests, but I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a fake 256 GB drive or something like that.
A far cry from their advertised speeds, but it’s still faster than spinning rust and good as a 2nd drive for data or (in my case) a Linux OS drive. Not planning on a lot of huge sequential reads and writes.
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I ended up dropping my 2230 from my order and grabbing the WD from B&H this week.
Yeh, a lot of suppliers seem to have the 2GB ones on back order, some listing March as the likely re-stock time. I thought of ordering one from B&H, who have been reliable for me in the past, but in the end spent a little more and ordered one from JB Hi-Fi here in Australia, who have them in stock. It’s sad that they cost so much more than the 2280’s.
the way to look at an ssd is what type of memory it is. the ranking goes like this from fastest to slowest. SLC>MLC>TLC>QLC. QLC can get you the largest capacities but they are super slow. they are not even worth it to buy them. stick with a good TLC or the rare find of a MLC if you can find them. Samsung 990pro up to the 2TB version is i think MLC and TLC single sided for the 4TB version. They are the strongest performing drives on the market at this point. That is on the 2280 sizes. 2230 max out at 2TB. if you are going to dual boot or need the 2230 for another reason make your main drive the samsung 990 pro and get anything in the second drive that you can find.
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Most modern DRAM-less drives are using SLC caching and a host memory buffer. This largely bypasses the issues of QLC so long as the drive is using a good controller that supports both SLC ca hing and hmb, and has a reasonably large SLC cache. It’s worth looking up reviews to make sure the drive is tuned well, but QLC is mainly an issue if you’re looking for PCIe4 levels of performance (5000MBps or more sequential r/w), or need to write many hundreds of gigabytes at once which exhausts the SLC cache. Almost all modern 2tb 2230 drives are based on QLC, with the exception of the WD sn770M. It will outperform the QLC base drives, because it’s using a very new TLC based nand chip, and a pretty good controller made by WD. With that said, the QLC drives like the micron, the adata, the rocket, or a couple others will still have good performance, and they tend to be a little bit more power efficient as well. There should be more TLC drives with two terabyte capacities coming out this year, so maybe worth waiting if you want to high capacity 2230 drive. For one terabyte drives, there are a lot more TLC options that have a good balance of performance and power efficiency. Tom’s hardware and tech power up are both good resources to find SSD reviews, as well as spec comparisons.