We took note of the drive’s temperature during some of our benchmarking runs.
Because of the WD_Black SN770M's small format, we had to use an adapter to test the drive in our normal test rig. The Sabrent EC-PCIE comes with an aluminium heatsink and thermal padding to help keep any drive inside cool. The hottest the drive got was when it was being pushed very hard during the Sequential write test using CrystalDiskMark8, when it peaked at 60° C which is 25° C under the maximum operating temperature. For the non-4 K tests the drive averaged 51°C while for the 4K-based tests, the average was 47.6°C.