Western Digital WD_BLACK D50 Game Dock, Thunderbolt 3

The WD Black D50 Game Dock acquitted itself quite nicely as an external storage solution. Sequential read and write performance was very similar to native PCI Express NVMe storage, as it pushed up near to 3 GB per second in some instances. Where it faltered in comparison to internal storage was in random access times. IOPS test results were pretty sluggish across the board, but this isn't a boot drive so it doesn't matter nearly as much as it might if it was built into the notebook.

At the end of the day the WD_BLACK D50 Game Dock is a simple way to add connectivity to platforms that you wish had more options. Being able to plug in one Thunderbolt 3 cable and to have everything just work right on Windows 10 is pretty impressive. There were no drivers to mess with and the setup experience went so smooth that we were concerned! Plugging in a DisplayPort connection to a secondary monitor instantly duplicates the display without even needing to press a button. When using the DisplayPort and Thunderbolt 3 connectors on the WD_BLACK D50 Game Dock, a dual-display configuration is supported at up to 4K 60Hz. A larger display is something many laptop users crave and this solves that issue. Laptop charging support is icing on the cake as Seagate’s Gaming Dock lacks that feature. The added connectivity and ease of use is most impressive. The storage performance of the 1TB drive in our D50 Game Dock was awe inspiring. We saw sequential speeds top out at over 3.0 GB/s read and 2.5 GB/s write. This exceeds the drives rated speeds and is great news for content creators and gamers that are looking to quickly move files and games around. We got those numbers at a queue depth of 8, but low queue depth performance at QD1 was solid with speeds of around 2.2 GB/s on both read and write operations.