On one hand, this is good news for would-be-buyers who are looking for flexibility in their storage options (after all, they might want to buy the D30 in all-black, repurpose the drive to be used with another console or PC, or simply use it for storing media such as high-quality gameplay clips and screenshots captured via Xbox DVR, for example).
#Format seagate drive for xbox one series#
“The D30 cannot run Xbox games that are designed, upgraded or updated to specifically take advantage of the Xbox Series consoles’ Velocity Architecture”īefore diving into testing, it should be clarified that despite being Xbox-branded, the WD Black D30 for Xbox is essentially no different from the standard, all-black variant that’s currently available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and, of course, PC. The included stand for the casing and the much-appreciated move to USB-C connectivity are also great touches, especially the latter, as users can now easily replace the-much-too-short-included USB 3.0 cable with a longer, inexpensive one if needed. The white & black colourway makes the Black D30 a perfect visual companion piece to the standard Xbox One S or Xbox Series S, and the slightly smaller footprint granted by the slimmer, more compact NVMe SSD that it contains allows for a compact form factor that takes up very little space.
Similar to the WD Black P10 Game Drive that we reviewed back in June, the Black D30 sports the same industrial-meets-military-black-ops design that helps it to stand out from competing drives on the market, but this Xbox-branded variant has a bit more going for it visually it’s actually kind of cute. Considering how cost-prohibitive SSD prices have been over the past year and continue to be, however, it’s a fair question to ask if such a happy medium is even feasible. Consequently, NVMe storage doesn’t enter the Xbox conversation quite as often, but that hasn’t stopped some of Seagate’s competitors from trying.Įnter the WD Black D30 NVMe SSD Game Drive for Xbox, which clearly aims to strike an acceptable balance between the affordability of a mechanical hard drive and the faster loading and startup times that hardcore gamers have come to expect from PS5 and Xbox Series X|S thanks to the revolutionary internal SSD speeds of those consoles as well as the aforementioned Seagate Expansion. Meanwhile, over in Xbox-land, where internal memory upgrades have been completely off the table from the beginning, but the vast majority of Xbox games can run off of standard drives (at least for now), plug-and-play expansion options abound, from your average USB 3.0 external HDD to Microsoft’s much faster (not to mention pricier and proprietary) Seagate Storage Expansion Card.
According to Sony, only certain specifications of this expensive high speed memory format are fast enough to match the console’s lightning-fast internal drive, hence the limited public rollout of the feature. This is especially the case for both the disc and disc-less editions of the PlayStation 5, for which Sony recently opened up limited support for internal NVMe SSD drives to PS5 owners participating in the most recent OS beta. These days, it seems that whenever one brings up storage options for next-gen consoles (i.e., PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S), it’s all about NVMe.
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