WD Black SSD for Xbox and PS5, plus new SanDisk Professional line, drive into 2021

At its annual storage launchapalooza, Western Digital  on Wednesday announced several new products in its gaming-focused WD Black line as well as a new brand, SanDisk Professional, which will house its G Technology drives, launching with several new products. Notably, for those of us dearly missing an updated model of the Lexar Professional Workflow HR1 card-reader hub, WD gifts us with a modern model of its own.

The D30 Game Drive is an external solid-state drive that comes in two flavors with cosmetic differences: a logo'd version for Xboxers and a standard model for use with PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One , PC or Mac. Read speed tops out at 900 megabytes per second (7.2Gbps), well below the USB-C connection's 10Gbps peak. There's nothing particularly special about the D30 vis-a-vis the consoles ; like other external SSDs, it can only store games from the most recent models, requiring you to copy them to internal storage to play. You can play last-gen games off the drive on the Series X, Series S and PS5. Capacities range from 500GB to 2TB.

The WD Black D30 Game Drive is available now starting at $90, while the WD Black D30 Game Drive for Xbox ships in June for slightly more -- it starts at $100.

There's also a new PCIe Gen4-compatible NVMe SSD, the WD Black SN750 SE, an update of the current SN750, with better power consumption and slightly faster throughput at 3,600MBps peak read speed and 2,380MBps peak write. Like all drives, throughput tends to depend upon capacity; these are for the 1TB model. It will come in capacities ranging from 250GB to 1TB when it ships this summer, starting at $55.

A modular hub with bays for four plug-in card readers, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, two USB-A ports and an audio jack, the SanDisk Professional G-Technology Pro-Dock 4 had me chair-dancing during my briefing. It can download simultaneously from all four readers to vastly speed up ingesting video and photos. The Pro-Reader series of readers, which connect via an internal 10Gbps USB-C interface and can also be used standalone, come in CFast, CFexpress, Red Mini-Mag, microSD and SD options. Its built-in 250-watt power supply can drive your laptop, 4K video out through the USB-C connectors and it can connect to a network via Ethernet.

Other new storage options in the Pro line include a Pro-Cinema CFexpress VPG400, a rugged card with a minimum sustained write speed of 400MBps, an external 4TB G-Drive encrypted NVMe SSD and multiple desktop RAID solutions. They'll be rolling out over the course of the next several months. We don't yet have pricing for any of the Pro series products.