We love the WD_Black D10 series 12TB External Gaming Drive. It makes for a great external solution for both PCs as well as past gaming consoles. I say past because the ones launching next month are going to work best with NVMe SSD solutions when it comes to taking advantage of the proper load times and frame rates.
This also makes for a great general external storage solution for everything else, although there are a few more affordable 12TB-14TB solutions on sale recently if you don’t need the boost in speed this has to offer. This is the only thing that would have dropped the score on this one is how expensive it is (but only if we could have dropped it by half a star, which we cannot sadly).
Is the drive a little louder than some? Yes, it can be. Is it annoying? Not really, unless you sit it too close to you are you are using it. If it is under a desk or has some distance between you and where it sits, it isn't as noticeable. If you had any experience with the type of drive that is inside, you'd fully understand this and expect it.
How much faster is it? This can vary depending on the speed of the drive sending information to it with, as well as the type of files (quantity, size, etc). It varies if you are actively writing to it vs transferring a file. This is the same with any drive. However, usually everyone likes to base everything on the write speed of file transfers, and in that case, the average speed was around 230MB/s. Faster than your typical 5400rpm external drive, but not going to change your life or anything. It's just there if require the extra speed. This also depends on the drive you'd be comparing it to--old or modern, which could make the difference anywhere between 50-100MB/s faster than these other HDD options.
It's nice to have a fan already inside since if you abuse your external drives with constant large transfers and monitored their temps. you'd realize many of them like to get quite a bit hot. So having a fan inside already helps prolong the life of the drive.
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| RAM | 8 TB |
|---|---|
| Hard Drive | 8 TB Mechanical Hard Disk |
