WD Black D30 Game Drive SSD 1TB Review

1. Introduction2. WD Black D30 Game Drive SSD 1TB3. ATTO/CrystalDiskMark/AS SSD4. Throughput5. PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark6. Real Life File Transfers7. Closing Thoughts8. View All Pages

The latest addition to WD's Black Game Drive range of external SSDs is the D30, a compact drive using an NVMe SSD combined with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gb/s) interface. Priced at £150, let's find out how it stacks up against the competition.

At the time of writing this review, three models make up the Black D30 Game Drive range; 500GB, 1TB (the drive we are reviewing here) and a flagship 2TB unit. Inside the enclosure is a WD SN550E NVMe SSD (WD 4-channel controller and BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC NAND) which in combination with the USB interface gives the Black D30 Game an official Sequential performance of up to 900MB/s across the range.

WD doesn’t state any endurance rating for the Black D30 Game Drive but the 1TB SN550 drive inside it has a 600TB TBW rating and WD back the drive with a three-year warranty.

Physical Specifications:

• Usable Capacities: 1TB.
• NAND Components: SanDisk 96-layer 3D TLC.
• Interface: USB 3.2 Gen 2.
• Form Factor: External.
• NAND Controller: WD.
• Dimensions: 96 x 35 x 58mm.
• Drive Weight: 125g.

Firmware Version: 3083.

The WD Black D30 Game Drive comes in a stout box which is a lot bigger than the actual drive inside it – something which isn't difficult as the drive measures a diminutive 96 x 35 x 58mm. The front of the box has an image of the drive on the front along with the normal WD Black branding. Under the right-hand side of the image, we see the drive’s capacity and its read speed in both English and French. On the left-hand side of the box, there is some bi-lingual text explaining that the drive works with PlayStation, Xbox and PC.

The back of the box has a small image of the drive with the USB Type-C port labelled. To the left of this image is a box contents list and the drive compatibility options, again in both English and French along with logos informing users of the 3-year warranty and that the SSD inside the unit uses 3D NAND.

One side panel of the box has a life-size front view image of the drive.

The WD Black D30 Game Drive design follows the same look and feel of other recent WD Game devices, that is to say that it looks like a miniature modern-day weapons storage case, the type you’ll find littered throughout any decent FPS game.

The SSD inside the Black D30 Game Drive is recognised by the CrystalDiskInfo utility as a WD SN550E. The 1TB SN550 (it's a pretty reasonable guess that the E stands for external) is part of WD's Blue mainstream portfolio. It uses an in-house WD 4-channel controller and BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC NAND and is officially rated at up to 2,400MB/s and up 1,950MB/s for Sequential read and writes respectively.

The drive uses a USB Type-C port which is housed in one end of the drive with a White LED drive activity light in the opposite end of the drive.

Bundled in with the drive is a USB Type-C to Type-A and cable, a cradle for the drive and a Quick Install Guide.

CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V7.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.

Using the ATTO benchmark, the best Sequential read/write figures we saw were 891MB/s and 805MB/s respectively. With the more demanding AS SSD benchmark, the read figure dropped to 852MB/s with writes at 787MB/s. However, we could confirm the 900MB/s official figure for reads at least using CrystalDiskMark 7 with a best test result of 934MB/s with writes falling just short at 839MB/s.

In our read throughput test, the drive peaked at 839.78MB/s at the 16MB block mark, a little shy of the official maximum of 900MB/s. When it came to the write throughput test, the peak figure again came at the 16MB block mark at 800.99MB/s.

The PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark has been designed to test drives that are used for storing files rather than applications. You can also use this test with NAS drives, USB sticks, memory cards, and other external storage devices.
The Data Drive Benchmark uses 3 traces, running 3 passes with each trace.

Trace 1. Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, in to the target drive (write test).
Trace 2. Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
Trace 3. Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test).

The WD Black D30 Game Drive handles the PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark very well with the best performance result of the three traces being the 288MB/s for the read-write test.

The performance of the WD Black D30 in all three traces is very strong when comparing it with its competitors we have reviewed.

To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.

We use the following folder/file types:

• 100GB data file.
• 60GB iso image.
• 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
• 50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
• 12GB Movie folder – (15 files – 8 @ .MKV, 4 @ .MOV, 3 @ MP4).
• 10GB Photo folder – (304 files – 171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG).
• 10GB Audio folder – (1,483 files – 1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files).
• 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
• BluRay Movie – 42GB.
• 21GB 8K Movie demos – (11 demos)
• 16GB 4K Raw Movie Clips – (9 MP4V files).
• 4.25GB 3D Printer File Folder – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds).
• 1.5GB AutoCAD File Folder (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF).

The Black D30 Game Dock didn’t have any real problems dealing with our real-life file transfer tests with the exception of the 100GB data file transfer which is a little slower than we normally see. When it comes to write performance it's the smaller files that make up the 60GB Steam, 50GB File and 10GB Audio folders that slow the drive down.

To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSDs we use the same files but transfer to and from a 512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400:

Taking the SATA drive out of the loop shows just how fast the WD Black D30 Game can perform, although writing the contents of the 60GB Steam, 50GB File and 10GB Audio folder transfers still slows the drive down compared to the large file transfers.

Sitting between the D10 and the D50 Game Dock, the new WD D30 Game Drive SSD is a compact external drive using a combination of an NVMe SSD in combination with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface and is available in three capacities (at the time of writing); 500GB, 1TB (our review sample) and a 2TB flagship model.

Internally the drive uses one of WD’s own Blue SN550 M.2 NVMe SSDs which uses a WD in-house controller and BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC NAND combination. All the drives in the range have the same up to 900MB/s read/write performance rating.

When tested with the ATTO benchmark we could confirm the official read performance of up to 900MB/s with a test result of 891MB/s. The rested write result of 805MB/s is a little short of the official 900MB/s. The more demanding AS SSD benchmark produced figures of 852MB/s and 767MB/s for read and writes respectively. The default Real World profile of CrystalDiskMark7 produced a read performance of 644MB/s with writes at 758MB/s.

When it came to our Real-life file transfers to and from a Samsung SSD850 PRO the drive averaged 298.84MB/s when writing the thirteen tests to the drive and 409MB/s when reading the data back. However, switching over to another NVMe drive (Kioxia RD400) to transfer the data to and from, saw the read performance shoot up to 780.76MB/s while writes rose to 458.92MB/s.

There is also a special Xbox version of the Black D30 drive which has white trim and cradle and comes with a one-month membership of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and costs around a tenner more than the standard drive.

We found the 1TB WD Black D30 Game Drive SSD on the WD Digital Store for £149.99 HERE.

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Pros

• Sequential performance.
• Compact Design.
• 3-year warranty,

Cons

• Data cable is a bit on the short side.
  
• A little pricey.
  

KitGuru says: WD continues to expand the Black Game Drive range of external SSDs and the latest member of the clan, the D30, is quick and small enough to carry around in a pocket.

 

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