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WD Black D30 Game Drive SSD 1TB Review

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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Rating: 8.0.

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