Question WD BLACK P10 5TB Game Drive for On-The-Go! is this good for console & pc gaming?

superstorm666

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Mar 26, 2020
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hi,

some say it is and some say its got super slow write speeds etc, so i have no idea lol as i thought black drives were made for gaming in mind so it cant be that bad!

was going to buy 2, 1 for my xbox1 console and another for my pc as my steam gaming drive or would it be better having internal black for pc gaming as im not sure on this at all
i would be very grateful for a little advice on this please?

thanks
 
It's not only the drive speed but the USB interface speeds that you need to worry about. USB 3.0 has a very high theoretical max speed but it's just that 'theoretical'.

USB functionality requires CPU processing power. If your CPU usage is over 90% running that new AAA game then it won't have many cycles for loading content from a USB drive. It's not unknown for a USB 3.0 drive to use 20% or more of the CPU when busy reading/writing a lot of content. If the game requires heavy content loading from the drive WHILE gaming, you will probably experience slowdowns.

In short, it's not recommended for games that have a high CPU usage, which is most AAA games from that last few years. Better to get internal drives.
 
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It's not only the drive speed but the USB interface speeds that you need to worry about. USB 3.0 has a very high theoretical max speed but it's just that 'theoretical'.

USB functionality requires CPU processing power. If your CPU usage is over 90% running that new AAA game then it won't have many cycles for loading content from a USB drive. It's not unknown for a USB 3.0 drive to use 20% or more of the CPU when busy reading/writing a lot of content. If the game requires heavy content loading from the drive WHILE gaming, you will probably experience slowdowns.

In short, it's not recommended for games that have a high CPU usage, which is most AAA games from that last few years. Better to get internal drives.

thanks very much for all that helpful info and yeah i think i might have to go for an internal drive for my gaming instead. but for my X1 i think i will maybe get a WD 4 TB My Passport Portable Hard Drive for my xbox game then instead. heard the black p10s are SMR inside but the D10s are best to get on the black drives for external but crazy prices. amazon just dropped the 12tb and 8thb d10s down as well.
 
I have that WD Black drive. I've played PC games on it. It's fine and I don't notice a difference between it and any other hard drive I've ran games off of.

I wouldn't worry about write speed metrics all that much if you were planning to use this purely as an application storage drive. Outside of installing and patching, nothing's really going to write to it.
 
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yeah was going to buy one for pc gaming off either external black or internal. but then was trying to find a good external around 4-5 tb's that doesnt need external power for my XboxOne and everyones views are always mixed and seeing as low on cash im just trying to make sure i get one thats going to be ok :)