In brief: For gamers who regularly have to delete old games to make space for newer ones in their limited capacity consoles, Western Digital has now announced five models under the "WD Black" line-up of external gaming hard drives to take care of those worries. These drives range in capacity from a 500GB P50 Game Drive SSD to a 12TB D10 Game Drive for Xbox One that can store up to 300 games to make for an impressive library of titles, which showing off would probably be as much fun as playing.
Modern AAA titles with their DLCs, 4K textures, deep branching storylines and massive open worlds often end up taking 100+ GBs of storage on our gaming systems, both which PC and console gamers have to carefully manage if they intend to play multiple titles at the same time or if they fancy launching an oldie goldie from their collection.
While gaming consoles come with a limited storage capacity, 500GB or 1TB in most cases, even PCs with multiple TBs of storage drives can reach their limit for people with a large appetite for games. To save them the trouble of frequent deletions and re-installations, Western Digital has launched a new line-up of "WD Black" drives at Gamescom 2019 with a single "design language" to appeal to those who "are tired of deleting old games to play new ones."
Jared Peck, WD's Senior Product Manager in an interview with GamesBeat, said that people often don't play games citing their fully stuffed console storage in what the company has identified as one of the pain points in its survey. It mentions 45% of gamers who'd be buying a storage device in the next year and 41% of PC gamers who'll definitely be getting more storage. There's also a double-digit figure for console owners who are already attaching external storage to their consoles, reports VentureBeat.
The newly announced "WD Black" line-up is comprised of the following models (in ascending order of starting storage capacity):
- WD Black P50 Game Drive SSD (500GB $180, 1TB $250, 2TB $500) - This aluminum drive comes with a 20 Gbps Superspeed USB over Type-C (only drive in the line-up with this connector, rest have Micro-B) for transfer speeds of up to 1,980MB/s. It has a five-year warranty with shipment expected later this year.
- WD Black P10 Game Drive (2TB $90, 4TB $130, 5TB $150) - This drive has 140MB/s transfer speeds for the 2TB version while the 4TB and 5TB versions have 130MB/s. The latter variant can store 125 games coming in at roughly 40GB each. It also supports Superspeed USB 5Gb/s connectivity, comes with a three-year warranty and ships this month.
- WD Black P10 Game Drive for Xbox One (3TB $100, 5TB $150) - This drive comes with a two-month free subscription to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, features USB 3.2 Gen 1 and transfer speeds of 130MB/s. It has a three-year warranty and ships this month.
- WD Black D10 Game Drive (8TB $200) - With space for up to 200 games, this 7200 RPM drive has a faster 250MB/s transfer speed. It features active cooling and has an external power supply that also has two 7.5W charging ports for your devices. It has a three-year warranty and ships in September.
- WD Black D10 Game Drive for Xbox One (8TB $200, 12TB $300) - The most capacious offering in this model weighs a rather hefty 0.96kg that's capable of storing 300 games. The ample storage can be put to good use with the three-month free subscription to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate offered with this drive. Spinning at 7200 RPM, it can transfer data at 250MB/s and like the standard D10, there's an external power supply with two 7.5W charging ports. Also coming with a three-year warranty, this drive ships in September.
https://www.techspot.com/news/81522-wd-announces-12tb-external-hdd-can-store-300.html
