

External drives have a narrow use case for those platforms, allowing you to play and store Xbox One and PS4 games, as well as archiving those same games for rapid retrieval instead of re-downloading them. Both of those storage solutions are fairly expensive, and offer just a sliver of additional space for the money. The PlayStation 5 is more flexible, using an additional high-end M.2 drive you can expand capacity.
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The Xbox Series X and S both use a proprietary card for storage, offering an additional 500GB, 1TB, or 2TB of high-speed storage. It’s nice to see that level of consistency. Running this benchmark multiple times yielded almost exactly the same results, as did running it again after dropping a full terabyte of data onto it. Despite having only 128mb of cache (256mb is the sweet spot), the drive delivers every bit of speed that a mechanical drive can possibly muster. The performance from the drive is extraordinarily consistent. With all the physical bits out of the way, let’s benchmark and see where we land. A USB extension cable solves this problem, but a USB-C connector would give me a wider variety of choices, rather than having to buy a single-use USB Micro-B connector for this purpose. The cable is 1.8” in length, which is just right for my console, but very short for my PC, forcing me to leave it on top of the case rather than letting me locate it on my desk. While it’s not going to offer any additional speed bonus (the Micro-B interface is 5Gbps after all – far faster than the mechanical drive could ever go), we’ve all got USB-C cables hanging around nowadays – it’d be nice to see other connection types dry up wherever possible. Connectivity is accomplished with a USB Micro-B to USB-A, something I wish the industry would abandon entirely in favor of USB-C. So much so that I had to double check that it’s actually a HDD inside and not an SSD.


Measuring just 3.46″ x 4.65″ x 0.5″, it’s downright tiny. The 5400 RPM HDD is encased in what appears to be aircraft grade aluminum, with heat-dissipating ridges along the top. One of the things I like about the P10, especially since it’s a spinning platter hard drive, is the armored case. The WD_Black 1TB P50 certainly does the trick, but at $188 at the time of writing versus 5TB of storage for $109, you can see that obvious price to performance intersection once again. An hour of capture at 4K and 144fps took up 56GB. I have a thumbdrive, but frankly it’s getting largely insufficient as file sizes grow. What I’ve tried to build is my attempts to balance that price to performance, but it still lacks portability. By way of comparison, the largest M.2 drive available is the Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB clocking in at an eye-watering $1,299. Looking at the price to performance ratio, there are obvious breakpoints – there’s a reason why larger drives are called “cheap and deep”.

IoSafe Solo G3 4TB Fireproof & Waterproof External Hard Drive – 210 MB/s Seagate IronWolf 12TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD – 210 MB/s WD_Black 1TB SN850 M.2 NVMe SSD – 7000MB/s read speed and 5300MB/s write speed IoSafe Solo G3 4TB Fireproof & Waterproof External Hard Drive – $335 Seagate IronWolf 12TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD – $299 It’d be unfair to make any kind of comparison without going over the numbers, including price, of the drives involved in the setup I mentioned above.Ĭrucial MX500 2TB x 2 SATA SSD – $179 x 2 Without further ado, let’s get a closer look at the WD_Black P10. We got our hands on the gaming-focused hard drive, benchmarked it, and put it through its paces. Enter the WD_Black P10 – an armored ultra-quiet 5400 rpm coming in at sizes up to 5TB that could be perfect for holding onto your precious memories, or transporting massive raw video files from here to there. There are drives like the 1TB WD_Black P50 that are high speed, but the faster you go, the less space you’ll likely have, and sometimes you need that extra legroom. It’s a lot, but there’s one more drive I need – something portable. I use a tiered system for my setup, with a NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive for my high speed workloads like video editing and gaming, an SSD for high-speed storage where blistering speed isn’t required but mid-tier speed is required, a fat spinning platter hard drive for large files that I access infrequently or aren’t speed-sensitive, and a frankly huge backup drive for “cold storage”. I’ve got a lot of hard drives, and each one has a specific purpose.
