The Western Digital Black D10 is the solution to
all your gaming storage troubles.
+ Massive 8 terabytes of
storage
+ Impressive transfer rates for a hard disk drive
+ Compatible with almost anything
-Can be a bit noisy sometimes
With games taking up more and more storage, sometimes over 200GB for some Call of Duty titles, you may find it a struggle to free up space on your console’s built-in storage. The WD D10 aims to resolve this issue with a huge 8TB of storage, which will hopefully mean you’ll never need to delete a game again.
The D10 is part of Western Digital’s Black series of gaming drives. It is a 7200rpm external 3.5-inch hard drive that can be used for Playstation 4, Playstation 5, PC and the latest XBox consoles. The drive is housed in a plastic case with a LED power indicator on one corner. The rear has connections for the power cable, USB transfer port, two USB charging ports at 7.5 watts and a cooling fan. The drive also comes with a stand so it can be placed vertically. The design might be understated, however what really stands out about the D10 is the performance.
Whilst the D10 isn’t as fast as an SSD which can have read and write speeds of over 400mbps, the balance between cost and performance is outstanding, especially since 8TB SSDs are not cheap (well over £600). When compared to the stock hard drive on the PS4 Pro, the WD is twice as fast in benchmarks, which can be seen in games as loading times are significantly reduced. The D10 had a sequential read speed of 251MB/s compared to the 5400rpm stock drive’s 112MB/s and writes of 254MB/s compared to 111MB/s. This doesn’t necessarily translate to double the performance when being used in a console, however the speed improvement is very noticeable.
There are other benefits to storing your game library on an external drive too. Storing Playstation 4 games on an external hard drive frees up the built-in storage and allows you to transfer your PS4 library to a PS5 very easily. It can also reduce loading times as some external drives are faster than the stock drives in consoles. Another reason external drives are faster is because they are only used for running the game, whereas the internal drive would also be using some of the bandwidth for system functions. And with 8TB of storage, it’s unlikely you’ll have to worry about deleting games to free up storage.
Both PS5 and the latest Xbox can play previous generation games from an external hard drive with reduced loading times. This saves precious SSD space for latest-gen titles which will be able to use the SSDs to their full ability. On Xbox Series X you can also archive XBox Series X games to an external hard drive so they can be copied back and forth between the SSD and external hard drive without having the re-download the games each time which is a great feature, however it requires a lot of external storage. At the time of this review, this is not an option for the PS5, but rumours suggest it is something Sony is looking into.
Conclusion
The WD Black D10 is an excellent choice for the PS5 and Xbox series S/X as it can store a huge library of games. The performance is also impressive for a hard disk drive, while not quite as fast as an SSD it is much cheaper; it performs much faster than the stock 5400rpm hard drive in the PS4 Pro. The only negative about this drive is that it can be noisy when writing a lot of data to it, however this is not always noticeable.
If you do decide to buy the WD Black D10 please use one of the links in this review for the Amazon page. This supports TechByASK and has not additional cost for you.If you have any questions about this device or storage devices for your console/ PC then feel free to email us or contact us on Instagram @techbyask
Great review!
I use it on my PS5 for backwards compatibility and I love it. It is silence and I didn’t notice much difference between the SSD and this external hard drive loading time. I mean could be seconds of difference but sure this thing is fast. I play 60 fps with ray tracing depending of the game and all the bolts and perks you get on the PS5 SSD. At the moment of this review PS5 games cannot be installed in this external D10.