WD_Black P10 3TB Review

Manufacturer: Western Digital
Where to Buy: Western Digital / Amazon (Affiliate Link)
RRP: £99.99

Space is at a premium on our Xbox hard drives these days. Long gone are the few hundred MB installs of Xbox Live Arcade’s humble beginnings; now, even the simplest of titles seems to hit at least a few GB of data, right up to the frankly insane sizes of Call of Duty: Warzone or Red Dead Redemption 2. Those of us with launch era consoles simply cannot fit more than a couple of these massive games on the hard drive at a time. Luckily, expanding the storage is about as easy as it comes and today we here at the Tavern got a chance to check out the WD_Black P10 3TB drive. Will it prove to be a suitable solution to our space woes?

Put simply; yes. It’s a small piece of kit, with a pleasing white and black aesthetic that looks great when sat next to the machine. Plugged in via the usb-A to usb-B cable, it is powered by the console itself which is handy. Roughly 2.7GB is made available for us to use, which is roughly a 7x increase in space from the standard Xbox One 500GB, of which about 365GB is actually usable.

Access speed is up to 130MB/s, and in my time playing I didn’t notice any hiccups or discrepancies between whether the games were installed here or on the internal hard drive itself. In fact, I did notice a slight improvement to my download speeds if anything – despite a super fast connection, my Xbox would routinely only hit 30Mb download speeds when loading to the internal drive, whereas with this it would more often up in the high 80’s and beyond. Network strain is obviously a factor at the current time, but it was nice to see this uptick in speeds more frequently.

Of course, that doesn’t make those massive files any smaller, but that there is so much extra space is a blessing. I’ve often been of the mind that I don’t really need loads of games installed at once – I only have so much time – but too often lately it was a case of having to pick and choose what games to play with friends knowing I didn’t have enough room to have them all ready – with this drive, that’s a non-issue (at least for me, ha!).

At £99.99, it’s not exactly cheap, but for what you get I feel the price is more than justified. It’s a nice looking bit of kit that will fit in with your devices well, plus currently there’s also 2 months of Game Pass included too. It’s quiet too, and while it did put out a little heat when I left it filling up for a few days, it was never anywhere near what I would consider a worry – in fact, the metal cover on the top is there for exactly this reason and did a great job at keeping the temperature down.

Conclusion

If you’re struggling with these huge install sizes of modern AAA games, then the WD_Black P10 3TB is pretty much a no-brainer. The £99.99 price tag might seem a little high, but for what you get it’s more than justified; a nice looking, quiet, cool, and efficient expanded storage solution that will save plenty of time re-downloading games over and over. Plus, it’ll be a good place to store your back-compat games ready for the Series X later this year!

Hardware purchased for review.