WD Black 2TB P50 game drive portable external SSD review

With the WD Black 2TB P50 game drive portable external SSD( teardown), you can install new games without worrying about running out of space. Plus, you can also keep your old games intact. With the USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 support, it comes with optimised speed. Since it’s so fast, you won’t even remember your game’s running from an external USB drive, which is great. If this piqued your interest, continue reading our WD Black P50 Game Drive SSD review for more details about it. Reveal more in WD Black 2TB P50 game drive portable external SSD review.

In the box

We received our WD Black P50 Game Drive SSD in a simple black cardboard box. Aside from the Black P50 game drive, you’ll find other accessories such as a USB Type-C to Type-C cable. There’s also a USB Type-C to Type-A cable. Of course, Western Digital included the user manual to make installation easier.

Specifications – WD Black 2TB P50 game drive portable external SSD

• Portable
• 4.65 x 2.44 x 0.56-inches, weighs 4.1 ounces
• Capacity of 500GB, 1TB , or 2TB
• USB-C (USB 3.2 Gen 2×2) interface
• SSD read speeds up to 2000MB/s
• Shock-resistant metal case
• Includes USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to USB Type-A cables
• Compatible with Windows, macOS, PS4 and XboX one
• 5-year limited warranty

Price

Since you can now pick up high-quality external SSDs for less than 15 cents per gigabyte, the P50’s list prices might initially give you pause. In addition to our 1TB test unit, there’s a 500GB model for $114.99 and a 2TB version for $349. But the P50 isn’t trying to compete on price, so the true measures of its value are whether or not you appreciate the durability and styling, and whether or not you can take advantage of the maximum speeds that the USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 interface offers. 

Compare WD Black 2TB P50 game drive portable external SSD

WD Black 2TB P50 game drive portable external SSD review / teardown

Portable and build

The WD Black P50 Game Drive SSD doesn’t look like any other portable SSD I’ve used. Clad in a tough metal housing with the logo stencilled in white lettering over black paint with exposed screws on the corners, the P50 Game Drive SSD looks almost military. That metal enclosure also makes it pretty tough. 

The bottom of the drive has venting for heat dissipation and well as four small rubber feet. Also on the bottom is information about the drive and a QR code that gives the model number. The USB port is on one side of the drive.

That metal case makes it a bit larger and heavier than other portable SSDs, but it’s still quite pocketable. The USB-C port is used to supply power, so there’s no adapter to cart around, just the USB cable. Western Digital includes both USB-C and USB Type-A versions in the box so you can connect the drive to pretty much anything.  

Design

The best part of the P50’s physical design is that its uniqueness looks intentional, similar to the way that LaCie’s rugged drives have embraced the industrial-chic aesthetic. This is opposed to many other ruggedized drives, some of which have MIL-SPEC certifications but lack any features that could be described as stylish. If you like the P50’s aesthetic, WD also offers other peripherals with the same shipping-container styling, including the P10 external hard drive and the D50 dock, which combines an SSD and a Thunderbolt dock for connecting other peripherals. 

Size

The drive is bulky for an SSD, measuring 0.55 by 4.7 by 2.4 inches (HWD). The Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch measures 0.3 by 3.3 by 2.2 inches by comparison. But the added heft could help the drive better survive occasional drops and bumps unscathed. 

Connections

In the P50’s box, you’ll find a USB Type-C to Type-C cable, a USB Type-C to Type-A cable, and the Quick Install Guide. It’s nice that WD includes both types of cables, which means that no adapters will be required for connecting to PCs or game consoles. In addition to PCs and Macs, the P50 is also compatible with the Sony PlayStation 4 and the Microsoft Xbox One.

WD Black P50 Hardware teardown

WD’s Black P50 is powered by an ASMedia ASM2364 USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 to NVMe bridge controller along with an M.2 2280 form factor NVMe SSD on the inside, the WD Black SN750. While the SSD’s controller is capable of leveraging active state power management, as a WD Black product, the company optimized it for speed and disabled the feature. 

Capable of delivering roughly 3.5 GBps, the WD Black P50 easily exceeds the USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 limits, but WD’s Black SN750, the drive that powers it, isn’t the most responsive of SSDs. The flash operates at Toggle DDR 2.0 speeds of up to 533 MTps, which is less than half the speed of the latest 1,200 MTps flash. But while it lacks the fastest read performance, it has a very consistent write dominant performance profile. The SSDs feature a 1GB DRAM buffer for the FTL mapping table on our 1TB sample, and a tri-core architecture.

WD Black 2TB P50 game drive portable external SSD Performance review

WD rates the Black P50 to deliver upwards of 2 GBps read/write over its USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 interface. This performance is based on the speed of the SLC cache, however, and will degrade under large transfers. The WD Black P50 doesn’t feature a dynamic SLC cache like most SSDs these days. Instead, it leverages a small static SLC cache and a fast cache recovery policy for responsive and consistent performance.

The most extreme example during my testing was with a stock Playstation 4, which uses a 5400 RPM laptop-style hard drive. The PS4 is also equipped with traditional USB Type-A ports (USB 3.0/3.1). So the internal drive is slow, but the older generation ports hobble the potential throughput of the external SSD. Still, the potential for improved performance proved to be pretty spectacular. 

For the first part of the test, Marvel’s Avengers was installed on the PS4’s drive. Launching the game took over a minute (70 seconds to be exact). That is a long time to be sitting and staring at a TV screen… Next, the same game was installed on the WD Black P50 Game Drive SSD. Launching the game from the external SSD instead of from the Playstation’s own drive, that load time was cut by more than half, to 32 seconds. 

DiskBench

DiskBench is a storage benchmarking tool that allows us to test the transfer or copy performance of a storage device with real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of jpgs and 15GB of RAW photos), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. First, we transfer each folder from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device; then we follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

WD’s Black P50 Game Drive transfers files quickly, delivering competitive performance that even exceeded some of the Thunderbolt 3 competition under a few of the transfers. SanDisk’s Extreme Pro v2 performed better than the P50 Game Drive, but it is also a 2TB model with a larger SLC cache. At 1TB, the P50 easily outperforms all of its 10 Gbps competition.  

PCMark 10 Storage Test: WD Black P50 Data Drive Benchmark teardown

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. To test drives that store files rather than applications, we utilize the Data Drive Benchmark.

Although the USB 3.2 Gen2x2 interface affords WD’s Black P50 Game Drive high bandwidth, that benefit is not always apparent in average use. For applications, the flash’s ability to respond to a request quickly at low latency is just as important.

WD Black 2TB P50 game drive portable external SSD customer review

Excellent build USB3 SSD memory and good performance

I purchased this 1TB SSD memory from Western Digital at an excellent price in the Warehouse Deals section, and I can say briefly that it is a good product with high performance, even if in effects not much better performing than a medium/high speed NVMe memory combined with a good case.

Given the importance of the brand I do not dwell much on packaging, simple but pleasant with a good quality impression. The memory has a rather large plastic envelope, which seems made in 2 half-shells and in the contact part between the two halves there is a metal element. The whole thing appears rather light.

I switch to performance, with a test that I repeated several times in a period during the lock-down in which I purchased several of these products, copying from a folder containing several subfolders and altogether about 65,000 files for over 200GB. All by copying from Intel NUC pc with USB3 ports on which I mounted a 1TB WD Blue internal SSD.

I attach the images, in the first copy the SSD was formatted as arrived from Amazon in ExFAT format the copy time was quite high, almost 25 minutes. Turning to NTFS with (fast) reformatting, copy times fall by more than 20%, to just under 20 minutes.

Very well, but you can do a time of only one minute higher (about 5%) the same with a NVMe case to assemble matching us na good memory (I attach images of a test with Yottamaster and NVMe cases Samsung EVO 970), which has the advantage of the possibility of upgrading over time, while for the SSD of Western Digital I do not know it is possible (so far I have not had the courage to try to disassemble it).

It should be said that the abundant size compared to the houses to be assembled promote thermal dispersion and temperatures (outside) remain very low, around 41-42°C and this is a potential point to favor.

In summary a nice object and well done, maybe to prefer for those who have a controller with USB ports 3.2 Gen 2×2 20Gbit/s (not my case), otherwise I recommend it only if available at a good price lower than the official list

By Amazon Reviewer on WD Black P50 teardown

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