WD Black P50 External SSD Announced

WD Black P50 External SSD Announced

With its NVMe SSD technology and its huge capacity options, the WD Black P50 is a portable SSD, which Western Digital markets as “purpose built for gamers”. It reaches blistering top speeds of 2,000MB/s, although users need a very specific hardware setup to reach that.

As with the rest of the WD Black series of external drives, the Western Digital Black P50 follows a rugged, industrial blueprint as far as the design goes. It’s very compact as the dimensions of the drive are 118 mm x 62 mm x 14 mm (that's 4.65 inches x 2.44 inches x 0.55 inches), and it weighs in at 115 grams (0.25 pounds). That means you can put it just about anywhere you like. The WD Black P50 Game Drive lacks software support but comes with two foot-long USB cables; one USB-Type-C and the other USB Type-C to Type-A.

The portable SSD comes pre-formatted as exFAT for cross-platform compatibility. The WD Black P50 drive works with Windows, macOS, PlayStations, and Xboxes. It's a particularly good choice for running games on a PS4 or an Xbox One console, though compatibility with the next-gen machines is more limited (you can only store rather than run games).

The WD Black P50 external SSD is capable of 2,000MB/s read and write speeds, although it's worth bearing in mind that the relatively rare USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port is required to get the maximum speeds out of the drive. That particular port remains quite rare on laptops and desktops, and although the drive will work on any USB port, you won't get those top-tier rates.

The WD Black P50 comes in 4 capacities: 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB. Like most portable SSDs, Western Digital Black P50 Game Drive lacks an endurance rating, but the company backs the SSD with a suiting five-year warranty.

The WD Black P50 SSDs offer solid performance for gamers, but they have a limited number of write cycles, and may SSD eventually fail, leaving precious user files inaccessible. Then their owners will need to contact a professional data recovery services provider to get their critical data back. ACE Data Recovery team can successfully recover data from all types of storage media and will gladly help the WD Black P50 owners with their data recovery needs.