WD_BLACK D10 Game Drive Review

Manufacturer: Western Digital
Where to Buy: Western Digital / Amazon (Affiliate Link)
RRP: £290.99

I’ll echo the sentiment from my review of the WD_Black P10 – games are only getting bigger and bigger. With some of the top tier titles weighing well over 100GB, those puny 500GB and even 1TB built in drives on Xbox are not going to last long if you fancy having a selection ready to go at a button press. Thankfully, adding on extra storage is about as easy as it can be, and when they come in as beefy as the WD_Black D10, you’re not going to need to worry about jigging around the installed list anytime soon.

A whopping 12TB is packed into the robust frame, of which about 11TB was usable by the console for storing games. I’ve had the drive for just over a week, and currently am sitting at about 250 games installed, with another 100-odd waiting in the wings for my poor broadband to catch up with. Even then, I’ll likely have a few TB spare for a rainy day. While it’s still considered a portable drive, it uses a 3.5” Desktop HDD rather than the 2.5” version in P10. It also comes with its own power source, which needs plugging in via the A/C adaptor. While it’s not as plug and play as smaller drives due to this, the benefit of that massive storage far outweighs the need to free up another plug socket. It also has a read speed twice that of the P10, so installs and loading is that bit faster too. I’m no Digital Foundry level expert, but there was a mildly noticeable improvement in loading titles up, though if I’m honest not a game changing amount.

As you can see from the picture too, it’s much larger than the P10, or indeed most drives designed for plug and play console use. The above is a temporary set up while I was in the midst of moving my set up around, but thankfully the usb-A to micro-B cable has a good amount of length, so fitting it in and around any set up shouldn’t prove too difficult. Two 7.5w charging ports are included too, making extra use of the standalone power source, effectively taking one usb port away and giving two in return. Great for charging a controller or two while you play, I appreciated this extra touch, letting me still have my usb headphones and the P10 plugged in (for MAXIMUM STORAGE!!) while still having two ports spare.

When in use it emits very little heat, that solid build quality transferring effortlessly from its smaller brethren. A large fan port allows excess heat to escape too. Very rarely did I notice a light hum from it under heavy load as it searched for data, but this only lasted a matter of moments at a time. A neat little stand comes included, though again it can be laid flat depending on your space needs.

This design and sheer space does not come cheap though – at £290.99, it’s technically more expensive than an Xbox One X at the time of writing. If you’re really, really adamant on having all of your games available at once then this price will not seem so steep, but it also ensures this is for the most dedicated players only. Even more so than the P10, this will prove an incredible solution for back-compat games on the Series X, with you pretty much being able to fit most of even the biggest fans library on it, ready to load and run on the new console out of the gate. An included 3 month Game Pass sub will give you plenty to check out and fill it up with too.

Conclusion

It’s almost a preposterous amount of space, but the WD_Black D10 12TB­ provides that and more, presented in a sleek, cool, and quiet design. A requirement for its own power source, and that high price, mean that it’s more suited to hardcore players, but once the freedom of having to never worry about what games to keep installed has been sampled, it’ll be hard to go back. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to spend the next week installing everything I can find.

Hardware purchased for review.