WD Black adds five new external storage drives, including 2TB SuperSpeed SSD

WD's Black range of gaming SSDs just got a little bit bigger today, as they've announced five new external storage devices that will sit alongside their flagship Black SN750 NVMe SSD. Four of them are traditional hard drive disks, or HDDs (more on those in a sec), but the one I'm most interested in is the WD Black P50, an external SSD that has, and I quote, a "first to industry" SuperSpeed USB port (USB 3.2 Gen 2x2), which can supposedly deliver speeds up to 1980MB/s. That's twice the theoretical speed of current USB-C devices (a lot of which only use the USB 3.1 standard), which means external SSDs like our current champ, the Samsung T5, could be in a lot of trouble.

Expected to arrive sometime between October and December later this year, the WD Black P50 is definitely one to watch if you regularly need to take your games on the go or move between different PCs a lot. There's no word on price yet, unfortunately, which will obviously be crucial to whether this jumbo NVMe SSD is actually worth buying or not, but with capacity sizes ranging from 500GB up to 2TB plus a five-year warranty, it could be just the ticket for solving your storage woes. Personally, I still greatly prefer the sleek curves and bright colours of Samsung's T5 drive over the rugged, military-grade black box look of WD's drives (especially now the T5's available in a lovely new scarlet colour), but if it means I can back up and restore my games twice as quickly then I'll be all over it.

As for the rest of WD's new Black line-up, these include the Black P10, which starts from $90 and will be available as a 2TB, 4TB and 5TB portable HDD, and the chunkier $200 Black D10, which is a 3.5in 8TB HDD that's very much intended to remain on your desk. Both will have a USB 3.2 Gen 1 connection and come with a three year warranty instead of five.

Finally, there will also be special Xbox One versions of the P10 and D10 drives, even though the regular ones will work with the current Xbox One family as well. The Xbox versions, however, not only come with greater storage capacities (up to 12TB for the D10, for example, while the P10 will be available in 1TB, 3TB and 5TB models) but you also get a free trial of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with them. This includes both the Game Pass games for Xbox and PC, plus Xbox Gold Live membership. The D10 comes with a free three month subscription (a bit like AMD's current Ryzen / Radeon deal), while the P10 comes with a free two month subscription.

Again, there's no word on how much the Xbox P10s will cost just yet, but the Xbox D10 will cost another $100, taking it to $300. That's probably not too bad for another 4TB of storage and three months of Game Pass Ultimate, the latter of which at its normal, non-discounted price would cost you $15/month, so that's practically half the extra cost right there.

Either way, I'll do my best to get as many of these in for testing as soon as I can so I can really see what they're made of, and whether the Black P50's mega speeds can really topple Samsung's mighty T5 for everyday transfers.