WD Black D50 Game Dock 1TB Review

1. Introduction2. WD Black D50 Game Dock 1TB3. Testing Methodology4. ATTO/CrystalDiskMark/AS SSD5. Backup / Restore6. Throughput7. PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark8. Real Life File Transfers9. Closing Thoughts10. View All Pages

WD continues to add to its Black Gaming portfolio and one of the latest is the Black D50 Game Dock aimed primarily at turning a Thunderbolt 3 equipped laptop into a gaming station. At the time of writing this review, there are two capacity versions available, 2TB and the 1TB drive which WD kindly supplied for this review. Inside the unit is a 1TB WD SN730 NVMe M.2 drive which uses BiCS4 96-Layer TLC 3D NAND. Incidentally, this is the same drive(s) used in WD's Black AN1500 AIC drive we reviewed not so long ago.

The Black D50 Game Dock comes with plenty of options when it comes to hooking things up to it. Besides the two Thunderbolt 3 ports (one of which supports 87W pass-through charging) there also five USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gb/s) ports. Two of these are Type-C ports with one on the front of the drive and the other on the rear. The three remaining ports are Type-A with two in the rear panel and one in the front of the drive, the front one supports charging.

There's also a DisplayPort 1.4 port (which supports up to 5K 60Hz screens) and a Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port in the back panel along with the power in port for the 180W power brick the drive uses. Along with the two USB ports in the front panel there is also a 3.5mm audio port.

Even though the Black D50 Game Dock uses a small fan for cooling we never heard it, even when pushing the drive hard when benchmarking. It does get quite warm to the touch when being used but even so, if the fan did run we couldn't hear it.

WD quote read/write speeds for the Black D50 Game Dock as up to 3.000MB/s and 2,500MB/s respectively. We couldn't quite hit that maximum read figure under testing, the ATTO benchmark producing a figure of 2,818MB/s and AS-SSD 2,516MB/s. The closest we came was with the CrystalDiskMark 7 benchmark with a read result of 2,838MB/s. We could, however, confirm the official write score with the CrystalDiskMark 7 benchmark, the drive producing a test result of 2,576MB/s.

The Black D50 Game Dock is supported by WD's excellent SSD Dashboard management utility which is one of the best and about as comprehensive an SSD management utility as you’ll likely to find. It also provides a page of options and controls for the unit's RGB system. There are 13 basic pattern effects with options to fettle about with colour choice for most of them. The system is also compatible with MSI’s Mystic Light Sync, Razor Chroma RGB, Asus’ Aura Sync and Gigabyte’s RGB Fusion systems.

We found the WD Black D50 Game Dock on the WD Digital store for £429.99 (inc VAT) HERE.

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Pros

• Compact design,
• Performance.
• Connectivity.
• WD SSD Dashboard software.

Cons

• Pricey.

KitGuru says: A compact multi-port dock that offers plenty of options when it comes to connecting peripherals, with the added bonus of a fast NVMe SSD inside, but it does come with a pretty hefty price tag.

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