WD Black P10 Game Drive

amazon WD Black P10 Game Drive reviews

Designed with the gamer in mind, the WD Black P10 Game Drive can serve as a simple, stylish archive for your massive game library at a reasonable price.

One of the most effective ways for PC gamers to stretch their budget is to buy a PC with a relatively small but fast internal SSD that can hold a game or two at a time and keep most of the time. The rest of their library on a large but slower and less expensive) portable external hard drive like the WD Black P10 Game Drive. At $119.99 for the 4TB version we tested, the P10 is not only cost-effective but it’s also designed with an edgy beauty that will delight many gamers. That makes it a great choice for people who have dozens of titles that they only play regularly and who prefer to transfer the one title they are playing at the moment from an external drive to a boot drive of PC.

Design: Express your excitement

The most important thing to know about the P10 Game Drive is that the 2.5-inch hard drive spins at 5,400 rpm, which means its data transfer speeds will be a lot slower than that of an external SSD. The P10 is rated for speeds of up to 140MBps, compared to the typical 1,000MBps of most external SSDs on high-speed USB versions and built-in PCI Express NVMe. That means that you really shouldn’t download games directly from your P10 but instead transfer game files to and from your PC’s internal drive when you’re ready to play them.

In addition to being slower than SSDs, external hard drives are also generally bulkier, as they have to make room for spinning platters, drive heads, and related mechanical components. Fortunately, the P10 manages to include all of those parts in a relatively compact package. The 4TB version tested here measures just 0.82 x 3.5 x 4.7 inches (HWD) and weighs about 8 ounces. WD also sells a similarly-sized 5TB version for $139.99, as well as a thinner, $79.99 2TB model that’s just 0.31 inches thick and weighs 5 ounces. These sizes are relatively standard for portable drives. They are much smaller and lighter than external hard drives built around a 3.5-inch drive mechanism designed to sit on a table, like the WD My Book (comparison, 6.7 x 1.9 x 5.5 inches).

The most distinguishing physical feature of the P10 is not its compactness but its aesthetics. It is perhaps best described as a “luxury container.” The P10 takes its design cues from a shipping container, something that’s clearly in vogue given how often they’re used as cover in post-apocalyptic-waste FPS games. The drive is a black rectangle with ribbed edges and prominent hexagonal screws at each corner, while a small LED indicator on one of the shorter sides lets you know when the drive is reading or writing data.

The P10’s branding matches the shipping container theme, with a stylized font and layout that evokes handy content labels. If you’re a fan of this style, some other WD Black products will make use of it, including the P50 external SSD and the D50 dock. The latter combines an SSD and a Thunderbolt dock to connect other peripherals.

In addition to bringing gameplay elements to life, the P10’s ribbed shell also helps protect the internal drive. WD doesn’t claim that the P10 meets the MIL-SPEC durability tests, but the company describes the case as “durable.” The P10 comes with a relatively standard three-year warranty. Like most drive warranties, it applies to the drive itself, but it won’t cover data recovery if your drive fails.

Missing in action: USB-C

In the box of the P10 Game Drive, you will find just a USB Type-A cable and a Quick Setup Guide. That means you’ll need an adapter to connect the drive to a USB-C port if that’s your only port option. The drive itself has a micro-USB connector, and it supports the USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface (i.e., what was once called USB 3.0). With USB Type-C connections becoming more and more popular, the omission of the USB-C cable is an unfortunate mistake for WD.

In addition to PC and Mac, the P10 is also compatible with Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One. However, depending on their capacity needs, Xbox gamers may want to consider the WD Black D10 Game Drive for Xbox One, a 12TB 3.5-inch external drive with the same style and 7,200 drive mechanism rpm is slightly faster.

Setup with PC is simple plug-and-play, although advanced users can download add-ons such as the WD Drive utility app and the WD Security app to set passwords and check drive health and perform other maintenance tasks.

WD Black P10 Test: Standard Disk Performance

The P10 Game Drive’s results in our external drive benchmark tests show that it performs as you’d expect from a modern 5,400-rpm hard drive. As measured by the Crystal DiskMark 6.0 test, its sequential read and write speeds are around 130MBps, not far from the rated maximum of 140MBps. Read and write speeds measured by the BlackMagic Disk Speed ​​test are slightly lower – at just 120MBps – although they are not out of the ordinary. The WD My Passport 5TB and the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch 2TB recorded nearly identical results in these tests.

When it comes to transferring files to and from the drive, the P10 took 12 seconds to move a 1.2GB folder full of different file types. Its score of 1,896 in the PCMark 7 trace-based storage sub-test is also about what we expect from an external hard drive.

It’s worth noting, however, that all of these results pale in comparison to the capabilities of an external SSD. For example, the Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch completed the folder transfer test in just two seconds and recorded read and write speeds of around 1,000MBps.

Style is Storage Story here.

With such standard hard drive performance, the main strength of the P10 Game Drive is its unique design. If you value gamer aesthetics, the P10 is an obvious choice over other vanilla offerings like the WD My Passport and the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch.

Of course, this aesthetic isn’t for everyone. The P10 is also a bad choice for those who only have a few games and plan to load them without moving them to the PC’s internal memory. In this case, you’ll want the extra speed of an external SSD.

Otherwise, the P10 is a great choice to store your games for years to come. If you judiciously calculate the average game size of 80GB, the 4TB version tested here can hold 50 titles, serving as the main archive of style in your collection for years to come.

Advantages

Rugged, compact design

Good grip

Attractive design for gamers with good taste

Defect

USB Type-C cable not included

where can you get a WD Black P10 Game Drive online

WD_BLACK 5TB P10 Game Drive, Portable External Hard Drive HDD, Compatible with Playstation, Xbox, PC, & Mac – WDBA3A0050BBK-WESN: Buy it now

WD_Black 2TB P10 Game Drive, Portable External Hard Drive Compatible with Playstation, Xbox, PC, & Mac – WDBA2W0020BBK-WESN & 2TB WD Elements Portable External Hard Drive, USB 3.0 – WDBU6Y0020BBK-WESN: Buy it now