WD Black D30 Game Drive, Take Steam On The Road
A USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 Attached WD SN550E NVMe SSD
Kitguru just took a look at a portable SSD from WD that is advertised as a way to bring your games with you while you are on the road. The WD Black D30 Game Drive comes in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB models; it is the 1TB model which they tested out in their review. The WD SN550E SSD inside is part of WD’s Blue family, with their own 4-channel controller and BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. The PR rates the Black D30 Gamedrive for up to 900MB/s sequential reads and writes which the USB connection should be able to provide.
The benchmarks Kitguru’s ran never quite saw those transfer rates and the real world saw an average of 298.84MB/s when writing their files to the drive and 409MB/s when reading the data back. This will be enough to launch games from quickly but doesn’t quite match up to the Kioxia RD400 SSD they tested previously which could reach 458.92MB/s writes and 780.76MB/s reads.
On the other hand, you might like the look of the enclosure and a three year warranty on a mobile SSD is not bad either.
The latest addition to WD’s Black Game Drive range of external SSDs is the D30, a compact drive using an NVMe SSD combined with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gb/s) interface. Priced at £150, let’s find out how it stacks up against the competition.
