WD P10 Game Drive WDBA3A0040BBK-WESN 4 TB

Console's best friend

When creating fantasy hard drives, there is nowhere to roam. This is not for you to write "Alice in Wonderland". Therefore, the guys from Western Digital would like to take a special bow for the fact that they are not as boring as their competitors. A couple of years ago, one of the brightest stars on the external hard drive market was the WD My Passport and Passport Portable models, which stood out for their catchy non-trivial appearance and bold colours. And at the end of 2019, the company launched another interesting experiment called the P10 Game Drive on the market.

Ammo box

This is a solid and voluminous HDD, hidden in a strong plastic frame, strongly reminiscent of an ammo box. Just look at the huge bolts in the corners and the slots in the style of metal containers. Accordingly, it does not provide protection from bumps and falls (despite its formidable appearance), so be careful with it. The main buyers of the P10 Game Drive are PC boyars and owners of PS4/PS4 Pro and Xbox One consoles, who desperately lack the available memory to store their ever-growing collection of games on Steam or the PS Store. Considering how bloated modern games have become, even the 4 TB available doesn't seem like overkill. If we take 40 GB as the average volume of a modern game, then you just get a collection of a hundred toys. Although no one forbids taking a smaller or larger option, the assortment also includes 2 and 5 TB models.

Slightly faster than stock PS4 Pro hard drive

When connecting the WD P10 Game Drive to the console, you will have to spend several minutes on the initial setup, no extra gestures are required from the PC, the disc is picked up automatically. In terms of characteristics, the model fully justifies its not the lowest price tag: operating read and write speeds reach 140 MB / s and sag, not as fast as other external HDDs due to a capacious buffer. In work, he proved to be even better than the built-in PS4 Pro drive: loading a save in Assassin's Creed Odyssey took him 1 minute and 10 seconds, against a minute and 16 seconds for the built-in curling iron hard drive. Other open world games that take a long time to load also see a slight advantage of a few seconds. I also liked that during operation it behaves silently and practically does not heat up, and the rubber feet at the bottom dampen vibrations well and prevent it from scratching the table.