WD - D30 Game Drive for Xbox 1TB External USB Type C Portable SSD - Black

This WD NVME SSD is an excellent companion to the Series X. Super small footprint and plenty of storage for your media and games. Inside the package you get the Hard Drive, USB A to C cord, Stand and the usual paperwork. This HDD is small! I placed it next to my PC mouse for reference. Setting up was a breeze. HDD "clips" securely to the stand and just plug in the USB-C to the SSD and USB A to the Series X/S. The console immediately recognized the storage device for me and prompted me to format it for use. Performance is great. I freed up my internal storage of all my Game Pass games by moving it straight to the WD Black. Though, when I moved CoD to the HDD, I couldn't play it. It would tell me Game can't be played so I ended up moving it back to internal storage. Seems like newer Series X/S games must be played off the internal drive though can xfer to the WD if you need to free up space for later use. Every other game I DLed from Game Pass played perfectly without a hitch. Loading times seems exactly the same as it was being played from the internal drive itself. If you need extra storage space for your downloaded games, this WD Black is awesome. Highly would recommend for your digital library. Transfer times are FAST depending on the size of your files.

WD is pushing hard into the external USB storage gaming market, especially for consoles since games are so big nowadays, typically 50GB but up to 100GB for some titles. Even though you have 800GB-1TB of fast NVME storage, that's still not enough if you have a decent game library or have a few games you play frequently along with a few you are just playing through. Enter the ability to add affordable, yet still faster than download speed storage devices like the WD Black D30. There are some limitations on what games you can play off of the external storage device, it seems like most XBox Series S/X optimized titles cannot be played directly from the external D30, but XBox One titles an be. This is most likely due to the way these next-gen consoles architect gameplay around the extremely fast storage subsystems and the ability to seamlessly stream content and assets. In terms of performance and compatibility, I actually hooked up the D30 to my PC laptop as well just to verify the speeds and also compare against some other storage methods I have access to. The internal m.2 NVME SSD of the Dell XPS obviously blew away the externals at 2.8GB/s but that was to be expected. The D30 came in just as advertised at 900MB/s Seq. Read/Write speeds. It also stacked up favorably to the more expensive WD Black P50 which came in around 1000MB/s Read/Write, albeit part of this is due to the fact my laptop does not have the USB 3.2 2x2 required to get the full 2000MB/s advertised speeds. Also of note, this D30 drive can also be used with the PS5 and seems identical to the unbranded version of the D30, other than the XBox branding as well as a trial key for XBox Game Pass Ultimate, the only downside is you need to format the drive to work with the PS5 while the XBox and PC are interchangeable without having to format. In terms of build quality, the D30 is light and rugged feeling but slightly bulkier in width compared to the P50, which is metal, heavier and more premium feeling. Still, for the difference in price I would probably go for the D30 in 2TB over the faster P50 in 1TB if I had to choose. 2TB of fast SSD storage means you can quickly shuttle your primary games over to your XBox's primary storage and move them back when you're not playing, and you've nearly tripled your total storage in the meantime. Overall you can't go wrong with this fast method of storage and while you can get an HDD version from WD with a LOT more storage space, you're not going to get as much performance or copy speeds to/from the spinning HDD platform.

This Western Digital_Black D30 is a great addition to your Xbox storage. The drive itself is very small, it kind of looks like a little container box. It is so small it will fit in the palm of your hand. It can feel a little bit bulky due to its width but overall is relatively small. Now don’t be fooled by its size because this thing performs like a champ. This is a 1TB gaming SSD drive with NVMe technology rated up to 900MB/s designed for Xbox including the X/S . It connects via USB-C and the other end that goes to the console is USB-A. This a simple plug and play solution but it was required for the drive to be formatted by the console to be used for gaming. I can honestly say I did not notice any difference in the loading time compared to the internal drive. I played Cyberpunk and Overwatch without a hinch. Overwatch took about 4 seconds until I saw the first logo. The quick resume with the Cyberpunk was almost instantly from this drive. Once you plugin to the Xbox you can set it up to be the default installation drive. I did get an error with the Latest Call of Duty Black Ops “This game cannot be played from external drive”. I was not able to play this game from this drive. There are also few games that will display a warning banner stating the “newer games need faster storage” when you try to install them directly from the store. Most were series X/S games. Maybe that’s why I wasn't able to play the COD my version is X/S. i also noticed when I transferred the COD 130GB to the drive it took approx 30 min when initially said about 7 min and half. When I transferred it back to the console it took about 8 min. Overall this is a great expansion storage for your Xbox and the loading time I will say is on par with the internal drive. It is very portable, fast and with the 1TB capacity you can install a decent library of games. In the box you get the drive, USB-C cable, stand, manuals and a month free of Xbox game pass code.