It’s become a running joke to use the biggest games out there as a unit of measurement, but the fact is file sizes are ballooning and storage devices are a commodity. Fortunately, you don’t need to litter your beautifully sleek gaming PC with drives coming out the cracks, as just one WD Black 10TB could solve all your woes with ample digital space, and it costs less than ever before.
Plummeting to its cheapest yet, you can nab the 3.5in hard drive for less than $200 on Amazon, putting the price on par with the 8TB model. As far as I can see, this discount is exclusive to North America as the HDD still rocks full price across Europe, but there’s no harm in checking for yourself:
WD Black 10TB hard drive
Elevate your gaming experience with a WD Black gaming hard drive, boasting up to a whopping 10TB of storage space.
Take Ark: Survival Evolved for example. Load up all the DLCs alongside several mods and the sandbox game can easily inflate to 271GB before factoring in any other install. Designed for exactly this, you can fit it all on WD Black 10TB 36 times before hitting that astronomically high ceiling. I’m not sure why you’d want to, but even then you’ll still have enough space for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Avowed, and a Windows install with room to spare.
To address the elephant in the room, yes: hard drives are slower than SSDs. With 267MB/s transfer rates, it’s but a fraction the speed of its M.2 counterparts, but this translates into value. Snapping up this deal, you’ll be spending $0.02 per gigabyte compared to $0.05 for the cheapest 4TB NVMe models. Besides, depending on your broadband speeds, it’s often still quicker to swap installs from hard drive to SSD and vice versa than it is to uninstall and redownload everything when you need it.
Its larger 512MB cache helps keep endurance high, but just in case anything goes awry, Western Digital offers a five-year limited warranty as a safety net. You’ll also be able to call on Amazon’s renowned customer service for help, alongside making use of its 30-day refund guarantee if you’re not happy with the purchase. Just keep in mind that this could take up to two months to ship.
