Send your laptop to more storage space...and all your peripherals through a single wire

If you have money, WD Black D50 Game Dock NVMe SSD can provide you with an industrial cool fast drive/dock with up to 2TB storage space and a large number of ports. However, if your PC lacks Thunderbolt 3, it will be troublesome.

The WD Black D50 Game Dock ($319.99 without SSD, $679.99 for 2TB tested) has a large number of useful connectors and (except the basic version) fast solid-state drive, which is great for enhancing the connectivity of laptops or mini desktops Methods and storage. Whether you have a huge game library or want to store a lot of videos and photos, the 2TB SSD models we tested have excellent speed and capacity. D50 can supply power to a laptop through its interface; you can connect it to a local area network; and you can easily add a mouse, keyboard, monitor, and other peripheral devices. There are only two caveats: it is not cheap, and it is not suitable for computers without Thunderbolt ports.

WD Black D50 has the same general form factor as a mini PC or palm projector, and the square box size is 2.2 x 4.7 x 4.7 inches (HWD). This all-black hard drive replicates the industrial fashion beauty of WD Black series devices, such as WD Black P50 Game Drive SSD, which is similar to the kind of transportation container you might use as a cover in FPS games. The top and bottom of the D50 have the same corrugated texture as the box, and the model name displayed in white font on the top cover.

The front and rear are occupied by the numerous ports of the dock, especially the rear. In addition to the jack for the 180 watt power adapter and the grille for the cooling fan, you will also find an RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet jack, two Thunderbolt 3 ports (one provides 87 watts of USB power supply), One DisplayPort 1.4 connector, one USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port and two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports.

On the front are additional USB-C and USB-A ports and a headphone jack. Of the two remaining sides, one does not have any ports or slots, and the other has only a large ventilation grille.

The strange thing is that the left label of the drive is upside-down compared to the right label, which means that the D50 will also work normally when turned over. For this, you can stand it upright and place it on the non-featured side with the grille edge facing up.

With so many ports-although I noticed that there is no HDMI port and security lock slot-you can connect a keyboard, mouse, headset, monitor (supporting 5K resolution up to 60Hz) or other peripherals and connect to a wired LAN, This is a convenient choice for environments where Wi-Fi is intermittent or without Wi-Fi.

When you connect the D50 to the Thunderbolt port of the computer for the first time, the RGB light strip will cycle through a rainbow pattern (best seen when the drive is upright or the WD name is facing upwards). You can choose a dozen other lighting modes in the WD Black SSD Dashboard, which can be downloaded for free from the company's website. You can also connect to a third-party (Razer, MSI, Asus, or Gigabyte) RGB control system from the dashboard, and check the drive status (space allocation, volume and temperature), run SMART diagnostics, or update firmware.

If your computer does not have a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 port (USB-C connector with the Thunderbolt brand lightning icon logo), this is not your drive unless you are looking for a door stop for $680. Try to plug it into a normal USB-C connection, Windows cannot even recognize the drive. Thunderbolt transmits PCI Express 3.0 and DisplayPort signals and DC power through a single cable. It is a high-speed interface developed by Intel and Apple in cooperation; it can be found on current Apple laptops and many mid-range and high-end Intel laptops. (Current AMD-based laptops are not supported.) However, this port uses the same physical interface as USB-C.

I tested the D50 with my Dell XPS 13 ultraportable laptop, which has two Thunderbolt 3 ports and used the Thunderbolt cable that came with the drive. When the laptop is disconnected from the adapter, the D50's 87-watt USB power supply can easily power the XPS 13.

The "naked" (no SSD) WD Black D50 is priced at $319.99, and both WD and Amazon are currently priced at $269. Based on a close reading of the Amazon and Newegg listings, this is the high end of the Thunderbolt 3 docking station's price range. Some of these docking stations sell for more than US$300, but most sell for less than US$250, and many sell for less than US$200. A good 2TB external solid-state drive starts at about US$250; SanDisk Extreme Pro portable SSD V2 is priced at US$330. The 2TB D50 we tested combines a drive and a docking station and retails for $679.99. Although the convenience of the D50's integrated design has a lot to say, you can buy a separate base and driver for a much lower price. But remember, you need a laptop with Thunderbolt 3 or 4 ports to make the D50 work. This excludes AMD-based models, many lower-priced Intel systems, and older laptops.

The WD Black D50 is an unusual product because it is an external Thunderbolt 3 docking station, which contains an M.2 SSD, and its speed is reminiscent of a fast PCIe 3 or low-end PCIe 4 drive. Our comparison products include a variety of external drives, many of which are sold as gaming drives or hubs, including a hybrid of USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Gen 2x2 SSDs, and a high-capacity (16TB) gaming hub with a 7,200rpm SATA hard drive.

We performed our commonly used external drive benchmark test suites for WD Black, including Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, BlackMagic's disk speed test and our own folder transfer test. The first two ran on a PC with the drive formatted as NTFS, and the last two ran on a 2016 MacBook Pro with exFAT. (See more information on how we test SSDs.)

Crystal DiskMark 6.0 can effectively measure the throughput of the drive: the sequential speed of reading and writing large contiguous blocks of data. We tested the sequential read and write speeds of the D50 at 3,027MBps and 2,546MBps, which far exceeded the three USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drives we included in the comparison group. Their peak read and write speeds were about 2,000MBps (although none of them Fully reached the mark in our test). Similarly, the USB 3.2 Gen 2 drives we tested were slightly lower than their rated 1,050MBps read speed and 1,000MBps write speed, and none of them cleared 1,000MBps in either direction.

The PCMark 10 storage test generates scores based on a mix of simulated workloads, including Windows Defender scanning, video editing tasks, and application launches. The WD Black D50 scored 1,753, beating five of the six comparison systems (except for the Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD), but FireCuda won decisively with a score of 2,445.

The Mac-based BlackMagic Disk Speed ​​Test is a favorite of videographers, and its score is often lower than that of Crystal DiskMark. We set the write speed of the WD Black D50 to 2,346MBps and the read speed to 2,279MBps. In either test, our USB comparison drive failed to score as high as 950MBps.

Finally, the D50 passed our folder transfer test, which is a stopwatch measuring the time required to copy a standard 1.2GB folder from our MacBook Pro to the test drive. I timed it at 1 second; six of our comparison drives took 2 seconds and one took 3 seconds, and the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hub completed the job in 7 seconds, which is actually pretty good for spinning hard drives .

WD Black D50 Game Dock NVMe SSD is equipped with multiple ports and an SSD that can hold dozens of AAA games or a small movie library with a capacity of 2TB we tested. It is a convenient, well-integrated mix of external drives and docking stations. It can It powers the laptop and provides an Ethernet connection, and has ports for connecting monitors, keyboards, mice, headphones, and other peripheral devices.

As we said, you can save some money by assembling your own docking station and external SSD bundle-if your PC does not support Thunderbolt 3, you must do so. If you have an AMD-based or low-end or aging laptop, you must pass. However, if you have a MacBook or a mid-to-high end, Intel-based Windows machine with Thunderbolt 3 or 4 ports, the D50 provides a convenient and powerful but expensive integrated solution in a clean small docking station and drive. Some things will never change: Thunderbolt equipment will cost you.

If you have money, WD Black D50 Game Dock NVMe SSD can provide you with an industrial cool fast drive/dock with up to 2TB storage space and a large number of ports. However, if your PC lacks Thunderbolt 3, it will be troublesome.

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As an analyst for printers, scanners, and projectors, Tony Hoffman tests and reviews these products and provides news reports in these categories. Tony has been working for PC Magazine since 2004, first as a staff editor, then as a review editor, and most recently as the editor-in-chief of the printer, scanner, and projector team. In addition to editing, Tony has also written articles on digital photography and reviews of digital cameras, PC and iPhone applications. Before joining the PCMag team, Tony worked in the production of magazines and periodicals in Springer-Verlag, New York for 17 years. As a freelance writer, he writes articles for Grolier's Encyclopedia, Health, Stocks, and other publications. He received an award from the American Astronomical Society for an article co-authored with Sky & Telescope. He is a board member of the New York Association of Amateur Astronomers and a regular columnist for Eyepiece, the club's newsletter. He is an active observer and astrophotographer, as well as a participant in online astronomy projects, such as looking for comets in images of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Tony's work as an amateur photographer appears on various websites. He specializes in landscape (natural and man-made).

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