Performance
To test the performance of such an unusual drive I did have to change things up slightly. I ran through our entire test suite both on the hard drive itself and again on the SSD. This turned out to be much easier than trying to show the performance results for a hybrid hard drive. With a hybrid drive random tests will never show the NAND performance because you have to use the same files multiple times before it moves the files over. With the Black 2 you have full control over what gets the additional speed, including your entire operating system.
So to start things off, let’s take a look at the CrystalDiskMark read and write performance numbers. As expected the hard drive performance numbers were a little lacking when put up next to all of the SSD’s we have tested recently. But if you look back to the Velociraptor the hard drive performance of the Black 2 is actually faster in some cases and not far behind in max read or write speeds. On the SSD side of things the read speeds are significantly faster than the hard drive but a touch slower than what I have seen from other SSDs recently. With a read speed of 425MB/s I wouldn’t call it slow, but it also doesn’t match the performance you would see from the fastest SSDs from each manufacture as well.
In Passmark the hard drive performance stands out even more without another hard drive to compare it to. But over on the SSD side the Black 2 is especially quick in the web server test. The numbers are faster than the Vertex 4 and the HyperX as well.
In IOMeter the Black 2 performed admirably beating out a few drives that I would still consider to be very quick.
In AS SSD the Black 2 really stepped up to the plate in both SSD and hard drive testing. The hard drive tests were actually faster than some of the older SSDs tested and very close to results from some of the more current drives. The SSD did even better with it being the fastest drive in the “game” as well as the “program” test. Only in the “ISO” benchmark did one other drive beat the Black 2. Considering this test is to get a good idea of how the drives will perform in the real world, these numbers were especially promising.