WD_BLACK 500GB D30 Game Drive SSD - Portable External Solid State Drive, Compatible with Playstation, Xbox, & PC, Up to 900MB/s - WDBATL5000ABK-WESN

The performance.

The whole package is smaller than I expected. Its great because I can easily fit it in my bag and take it with my laptop. It also doesnt require external power. Everything comes right out of the USB-A to USB-C port. The case is nice and rugged, and it looks like something I could throw across the room without having to worry about it. I made some GoPro videos at around 70MB each, and transferred directly from the laptop SSD to the hard drive, and I was getting a little over 300MB per second. Crystaldiskmark gave better results at 431MB/sec, but on 2 of the smaller sized file transfer tests, it actually wrote faster than it read. For any program that you need to transfer files to the drive quickly, this thing is extremely fast. Im personally using it for holding videos that I always cut into fast cut edits, and there is no slow down whatsoever. Its a perfect drive for it, and it makes editing videos take much less time. Overall a great drive. Highly recommended.

At the end of the day, this is a pretty standard high speed external drive. The enclosed drive is a NVMe drive, and the interface is USB-C. Inside the box you get: The external drive A small pedestal to hold the drive vertical A USB-a-to-USB-C cable Two notes: 1) The case is quite large for a NVMe drive. Its mostly hollow. I am not sure why they made it so large. Its large enough that I am disinclined to toss it into my laptop bag. Maybe the point is that they dont expect you to. But bigger for bigness sake doesnt really appeal to me. 2) They only include a USB-A-to-USB-C cable. There is no USB-C-to-USB-C cable, nor any adapter. This is pretty weird, since the high-speed ports on new computers are increasingly turning to USB-C (or Thunderbolt). I tested the speed of the drive connected to a recent model laptop equipped with Thunderbolt 3 ports. These are backward compatible with USB-C 3.2 r2, and support 10Gbps across that interface--which will max out the speed of this external drive. My benchmarks speeds are shown in the attached photo. Im getting about 930 MBps read and 845 MBps writes, which is in line with the maximum performance promised by the manufacturer. I have seen somewhat higher read speeds using NVMe and other drive interfaces, but this is decent. Note that reviews claiming that external drives of this sort can hit multiples of this speed are wrong. You could hit those kinds of speeds with a Thunderbolt 3 peripheral, but few of those exist. For USB-C USB 3.1 rev 2 devices, this is about the max youll get. On the whole, this is a decent external drive. I wish it included a USB-C-to-USB-C cable, and the case should be smaller, but it gets the job done.

Worked good on my Xbox One. Made load times so much faster. Also, it works good on my X series. Being able to move games, without needing to re download is so nice

I opted not to use the Game Drive for games because I do a lot of audio and visual work that requires huge files and inordinately long transfer times. By segregating them onto the WD Black 500GB D30 Game Drive SSD, I found it easier to locate and manipulate them as needed. High-Definition music and film when played seem to exhibit incrementally increased error rates as their resolution increases, so I was especially interested in testing the WD Blacks reliability during long periods of high density use. Plugged into the standard USB 3.0 port of my Oppo BDP-205, my routine transfer rates are 128Mb/s for 4K Ultra HD Blu-Ray, obviously well below the capacity of the WD Black, but my interest is reliability so Ive been using it for a solid eight hours a day over the past week. Performance has been flawless, thus far. The WD Black is PnP and booted instantly to my PC and both my Oppos. Its size might be a bit larger than necessary, but it certainly beats all of the portable drives Ive accumulated over the years. It met all of my requirements and expectations so I can recommend it without reservation.

If are not able to use this for your Xbox you might have to plug it in to a PC format it to NTFS then you should be able to format it again to be able to install Xbox games on it

I received this so fast! Very easy to set up! I got this for my Xbox series s and it works amazing, Easily can move games to and from the drive and play

The unit is about the footprint of a credit card but about an inch thick. It has some decent weight to it compared to my smaller SSD, which helps keep it from sliding around. It has long rubber feet spanning the base of the card. The speed is within range according to Crystal Disk Mark. interestingly enough, even though it is technically slower than my Verbatim, the numbers are actually reasonably close when it comes to smaller reading and writing benchmarks. its also cheaper and comes in bigger sizes.

I bought this drive to supplement the storage capacity of my Xbox Series X for games that I play that are not Series X|S optimized. To that end its been perfect. Western Digital put some serious thought into the D30 that make it perfectly suited for this role of second tier external storage. Its attractive negating the need to hide it away, its built solidy to make it suitable in the role of free standing external storage including the fact that it clips securely into the included stand, and its performance is decidedly top tier and current even if not quite as state of the art as Microsofts velocity architecture and the proprietary Seagate expansion card or the internal M.2 options for the PS5 required for current gen games. The first night I had it I downloaded ~450gb worth of fresh installs in a continuous write operation that lasted around 2.5 hours and didnt have a single issue, with the enclosure of the drive never seeming to come much above ambient temperatures. Load times are impressive, obviously its silent and overall performance is excellent. Bottom line, this is a quality external SSD purpose built to stand along side the current generation of consoles and in this application its second to none. If youre looking for an external SSD for your Xbox Series X|S or PS5, look no further than the D30.

I got this for my sons computer. Hes a gamer and has his computer filled up with games already. Its only got a 250GB storage capacity so he has some games that he was frequently uninstalling and reinstalling when he wanted to play them. I got him this drive so he could store his larger games externally on the drive and free up more of his internal drive. He absolutely loves it and its been working well for him. Its fast and the data transfer is both quick and steady. Hes had no problem playing AAA games from it. It doesnt really even get warm and of course, because its an SSD its very quiet unlike my old external HDDs.