In the grand scheme of things, hard drives are pretty unsexy. They’re the solid, reliable husband of PCs, and not the flirty side fling. They lack the bold, beating heart of GPUs, and the rainbow coloured lighting of other, more out-there components. Hard drives, traditionally, are very boring, but Western Digital’s new range gives me hope.
WD Black is Western Digital’s new range of storage solutions for gamers, and they’re pretty schmick. I had the chance to ogle at them on the PAX show floor, and even though I’m usually deeply bored by PC hardware, the WD Black range just does simple hardware so well.
The entire range, which encompasses a range of high capacity SSDs and HDDs, sports a fancy corrugated design that reminds me of a fashionable warehouse container and they’re packing some massive GBs for all your gaming needs.
The range comes in two versions — one for Xbox One, and one for PC. Within the PC range, you’ve got the P10 HDD, D10 HDD and P50 SSD drives, each with their own performance and storage capability. The P10s range from 2TB to 5TB and can store up to 125 games, while the P50 ranges from 500GB to 2TB with a superspeed USB boasting up to 2000MB/s. The D10 HDD has up to 8TB, can fit up to 200 games, and has a built-in cooling fan. What you choose will depend on your unique gaming needs, and how many games you play.
On the other side of the range, we have the Xbox game drives, pictured above. Pretty snazzy, right? The P10 and D10 are both offered for the Xbox, but the main point of difference here is that the Xbox version of the D10 goes up to 12TB and has capacity enough for 300 games. They also have the glossy Xbox logo and both the P10 and D10 for Xbox One come with two and three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate respectively.
The range starts from around $138 and maxes out at $568 for the top of the range D10 12TB Xbox One HDD, so not only are they some of the more stylish storage solutions on the market, they’re also pretty affordable. If you like your storage like you like your coffee — hot — they’re available via JB Hi-Fi now.
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