1. Introduction2. WD Black P50 Game Drive3. ATTO/CrystalDiskMark/AS SSD4. Backup / Restore5. Throughput6. PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark7. Real Life File Transfers8. Closing Thoughts9. View All Pages

The P50 Game Drive SSD is another member of a WD's rapidly expanding Game range of drives. It uses an NVMe SSD in combination with a USB 3.2 Gen2 x2 interface and is available in four capacities (at the time of writing); 500GB, 1TB (our review sample), 2TB and a 4TB flagship model.

Internally the drive uses one of WD's own Black SN750 M.2 NVMe SSDs which has an in-house controller and 64-layer 3D TLC NAND and there is an ASMedia ASM2364 controller handing the USB 3.2 Gen2 x2 bridge. All the drives in the range have the same up to 2,000MB/s read/write performance rating.

When tested with the ATTO benchmark we could confirm those 2,000MB/s maximum read/write figures with test results of 2,090MB/s for reads and 2,064MB/s for writes. The more demanding AS SSD benchmark produced figures of 1,868MB/s and 1,862MB/s for read and writes respectively while the default Real World profile of CrystalDiskMark7 produced a read performance of 1,524MB/s with writes at 1,808MB/s.

So far so good but when we started to run our real life file transfer tests we began to see odd disconnect errors, but not all the time. When it did happen the drive paused momentarily before carrying on with the transfer with one exception, our 60GB ISO transfer, which the drive refused to complete. This is the second P50 we have tested to show similar errors, so we've made WD aware of the issue and they are looking into it. If we hear anything back, we will update this review with WD's findings.

Overall, WD's Black P50 Game Drive is fast performing external drive (minus our slight disconnect error) but the trickier part of the equation is to find a device which supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 x2 to get the best out of it, which, at the time of writing means using a motherboard based on either AMD's TRX40 or Intel's Z490 chipsets or trying to find an add-in card.

We found the 1TB WD Black P50 Game Drive SSD on the WD Digital store for £217.99 (inc VAT) HERE.

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Pros

• Sequential performance.
• Design.
• 5-year warranty,

Cons

• Needs a USB 3.2 Gen 2 x2 interface to get the best out of it.
• Odd disconnect problems in some of our real-life tests.
• Pricey.

KitGuru says: WD's Black P50 Game Drive is a fast external drive using USB 3.2 Gen 2 x2 but systems supporting the specification are still pretty thin on the ground and then you have the looming shadow of USB4.

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