WD P10 Game Drive WDBA3A0040BBK-WESN 4 TB

Console's best friend

When creating hard drives, your imagination doesn’t have much room to run wild. This is not 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 in the external hard drive market were the WD My Passport and Passport Portable models, which stood out for their catchy, non-trivial appearance and bold colors. And at the end of 2019, the company released another interesting experiment called P10 Game Drive.

Ammo box

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

Slightly faster than the stock PS4 Pro hard drive

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