WD - BLACK Gaming 10TB Internal SATA Hard Drive for Desktops

Only one con: it only has 2 screw holes for mounting. The one in the middle is missing, making it impossible to easily mount it in my pc case. Every other 3.5 form factor HDD I've bought over the last 30 years has had 3 mounting holes. This drive is missing the middle hole. Even the picture of the product shows 3 holes. So I had to "rig" a mount for my case which needs that middle hole. Other than that it's the usual, best quality, longest warranty you can get for a regular HDD.

I needed to upgrade from a 2tb hard drive. This is exactly what I was looking for. It has good performance at a reasonable cost. I considered an 8tb SSD, but the cost was too much for what I am using it for. I am not sure about reliability, but WD has good customer service from past experiences. I recommed it!

I'm a huge fan of WD products and HDDs going back to their Raptor days, you know, the 10K RPM Prosumer drives with a polymer window that weren't quite as crazy as SCSI 15K Cheetahs but faster than the run of the mill 5400-7200RPM disk drives out there. I've tended to pay the premium for their Black lineup as the fastest HDDs...but once SSDs became mainstream all that reason to pay a premium for a mechanical HDD went out the window. For that reason, I was tempted to take off a star or two for WD trying to market this as a "Gaming" drive because in reality, no one on PC is gaming off a mechanical HDD nowadays. With the next-gen consoles changing the way game developers load and stream assets from storage, I'm positive a mechanical HDD as your primary storage medium will continue to become a huge liability. Where a large 10TB WD Black mechanical HDD does come in handy is as a short-term archive for game storage that prevents you from having to constantly delete and re-download games as your PC or console SSDs fill up. This drive needs direct attachment to your PC and currently, shuttling games back and forth from a mechanical HDD is a manual process. But on consoles, they have a very distinct hierarchy and help you manage and move games between faster local SSD storage and slower archive HDD storage. Hopefully the PC moves to this model as it will be needed especially as Microsoft moves closer to an XBox Series X gaming model. As for the drive itself, here's the major highlights I noted: +Its extremely fast for a spinnign platter drive. Like 50Mb/s faster than some NAS 16TB drives I have from competitor OceanDoor and another 20Mb/s faster than some TB WD White Label NAS drives I pulled from some EasyStore enclosures and put in my NAS. Its pulling the advertised 268/Mbs speeds for seq read/write which is extremely impressive, roughly half of what you will see on SATA6 SSDs. +Its extremely quiet. MUCH more quiet than that same OceanDoor competitor drive that sounds like codebreakers are living in my office 24/7. WD did a nice job when they acquired Hitachi's high capacity drive division and gaining that acoustic edge. +The extra storage and archival capabilities are going to be wonderful for anyone on data caps or slow internet connections that play a lot of different games. You don't have to download that game again when your friend wants to Co-Op and hit your data limit, or if you're on slow internet, you can just move it off your main SSD game drive, then move it back when you want. +Not SMR as far as I've researched. This is more of an issue for long-term data integrity. Cons As I mentioned: - The label doesn't look anything close to the one on the display art. None of that cool rugged full label, closer to just the standard white label. -You're not going to want to run your games off this drive unless you don't know what an SSD is. Yes its great if you want to manually copy and move games to this drive and then delete them off your SSD, but that's a pretty tedious affair. Hopefully Microsoft does this seamlessly at the OS level in the future, they already do this on their consoles. -Its an internal PC hard drive, an external enclosure would've been a lot more useful. Also for my PC I had a heckuva time getting the drive recognized. Ultimately I had to plug and unplug the power while the PC was on before it showed up in diskmgmt. Definitely recommend this drive if you want the fastest possible spinning platter drives with massive amounts of storage. However, I would personally look at WD Red or similar archiving/NAS drives to save some money since I don't really believe this is a viable "gaming" drive that you would run games off of. As next-gen games continue to evolve I think this will continue to become even more evident, but as an archival feature and ability to not have to re-download large 50-100GB games I think this drive does have a place. Especially because it is so quiet for a spinning disk drive!!!