Pictures and Breakdown
I mentioned the Black 2 is completely different before and just one look at the drive makes that painfully obvious. For one, I have to say, this has to be the coolest looking hard drive I have ever seen, beating out the old Raptor X with its all black design with a window in it. Unlike the hybrid hard drives, the Black 2 has its SSD half attached to the top of the drive. The hard drive itself is sharp with its machined design but my attention was focused on the PCB right on top. If you look closely, you can see where the NAND is attached on the underside of the PCB even.
In order to get your new Black 2 to work you are going to need to bust out the USB start key provided. Plugging this in will load up Western Digital’s landing page and allow you to download the software you will need to make it all work. Just to explain how the drive functions. Anytime you hook the drive up, it will come up at the 120GB SSD, this means you will be able to install your OS and then install the software. Once you install the software your PC will now see the drive as two partitions one the 120GB SSD and the other the 1TB hard drive. This means there are a couple limitations with this setup. First it requires this software, at this time this is only available for Windows xp, Vista, 7, and 8. Mac and Linux users are out of luck for now. If you use drive security, only the SSD portion of the drive can be considered secure. You can’t use the Black 2 in a RAID configuration as well, but considering its design is for single drive laptops, this shouldn’t be an issue. It is also not supported by Nvidia and ASMedia controllers, so you will need to keep it to your AMD/Intel based controllers.