Western Digital Black P10 Game Drive for Xbox review – Back-up basics

So, you’ve owned your brand spanking new console for all of five minutes and the hard drive is already full. Painful, isn’t it? Despite data being so cheap now, storage is still a perpetual issue thanks to games boasting file sizes larger than your mom’s Sunday brunch spread. Enter the external storage drive, a nifty albeit often clunky solution to the problem.

The ostensibly-named Western Digital Black P10 Game Drive for Xbox is a worthy entry into the market for gamers looking for an external storage regardless of their gaming platform. You read that correctly; it works equally as well on PC and PlayStation as it does on Xbox, and can store pretty much anything, not necessarily just game files. I’m guessing the Xbox part of the name is marketing, and that’s perfectly understandable alongside the heavy industrial shipping container styling, which gives the impression that this bad boy *slaps roof* can hold a lot of data!

My biggest concern with what we’ll call the P10 going forward is that it’s clearly a budget offering. The world has mostly moved on from spinny-boy mechanical hard-disk-drives (HDDs) and onto much sexier solid-state-drives (SSDs).

SSDs themselves are no longer the new kids on the block, having been around for some time now, so that makes HDDs feel even more archaic, and at a paltry 5400RPM spinning speed the P10 is practically a grandfather who can barely make it up the stairs after that last hip replacement. Poor oupa just sits there watching TV now; or, to unpack this metaphor a little more, all the drive is good for is dumping your game files on there when you’re not using them anymore – and then copying them back to the console when you need them and don’t want to re-download.

In Western Digital’s defence, they do offer a faster range of HDDs as well as an SSD range, so the P10 range is actually fine because they’re clearly specifically targeting those gamers who want a cold storage solution for their gaming needs.

Still, it’s clear the P10 is lagging behind. The first glaring flaw here is the Micro-USB interface, when we’re all on USB 3.0 Type-C now. The second is that there’s nothing really stopping me from getting a cheaper hard drive to serve the same cold-storage purpose. I use a Seagate external drive for personal cold storage, and in performance tests it matched the P10 at around 130MB per second in transfer speeds using DiskMark. So, what exactly am I paying for here?

I suppose the obvious one is the styling, because it is very pretty and would look cool next to your gaming platform of choice, in a gamer-y way. The next is Western Digital’s onboard software, which provides an added layer of security to your storage if you so desire. And the third is that delightful three-year-warranty covering mechanical faults with the drive. I’ve personally enjoyed using Western Digital drives over the years; they’ve given me much joy and no failures yet. 

There isn’t too much more to say about the P10. If your use-case is a game drive that can store and run your games, then you might want to consider the more expensive and similarly styled D30 series from Western Digital. However, if cold storage is all you need, and you don’t mind spending a few extra Randelas for a unique aesthetic style, then the P10 is a worthy contender.