WD Black D30 Game Drive SSD 1TB Review

1. Introduction2. WD Black D30 Game Drive SSD 1TB3. ATTO/CrystalDiskMark/AS SSD4. Throughput5. PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark6. Real Life File Transfers7. Closing Thoughts8. View All Pages

Sitting between the D10 and the D50 Game Dock, the new WD D30 Game Drive SSD is a compact external drive using a combination of an NVMe SSD in combination with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface and is available in three capacities (at the time of writing); 500GB, 1TB (our review sample) and a 2TB flagship model.

Internally the drive uses one of WD’s own Blue SN550 M.2 NVMe SSDs which uses a WD in-house controller and BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC NAND combination. All the drives in the range have the same up to 900MB/s read/write performance rating.

When tested with the ATTO benchmark we could confirm the official read performance of up to 900MB/s with a test result of 891MB/s. The rested write result of 805MB/s is a little short of the official 900MB/s. The more demanding AS SSD benchmark produced figures of 852MB/s and 767MB/s for read and writes respectively. The default Real World profile of CrystalDiskMark7 produced a read performance of 644MB/s with writes at 758MB/s.

When it came to our Real-life file transfers to and from a Samsung SSD850 PRO the drive averaged 298.84MB/s when writing the thirteen tests to the drive and 409MB/s when reading the data back. However, switching over to another NVMe drive (Kioxia RD400) to transfer the data to and from, saw the read performance shoot up to 780.76MB/s while writes rose to 458.92MB/s.

There is also a special Xbox version of the Black D30 drive which has white trim and cradle and comes with a one-month membership of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and costs around a tenner more than the standard drive.

We found the 1TB WD Black D30 Game Drive SSD on the WD Digital Store for £149.99 HERE.

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Pros

• Sequential performance.
• Compact Design.
• 3-year warranty,

Cons

• Data cable is a bit on the short side.
  
• A little pricey.
  

KitGuru says: WD continues to expand the Black Game Drive range of external SSDs and the latest member of the clan, the D30, is quick and small enough to carry around in a pocket.

 

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