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.

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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.

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In IOMeter the Black 2 performed admirably beating out a few drives that I would still consider to be very quick.

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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.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #33361 25 Nov 2013 23:48
Although I was out of town at MLG all weekend, I did manage to slip in a little work here in there. Todays review is Western Digital's latest creation, the Black 2!
Deb0's Avatar
Deb0 replied the topic: #33362 26 Nov 2013 01:06
We now need 22 of these to go along with the ASRock Extreme11.
garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #33363 26 Nov 2013 01:22
22 of these would mean 44 drives showing up in windows. You would run out of letters to name them :-P
Deb0's Avatar
Deb0 replied the topic: #33364 26 Nov 2013 01:51
Negative. AA is a valid name.
Plague's Avatar
Plague replied the topic: #33366 26 Nov 2013 10:54
really could have used one of these for Pandemic.
L0rdG1gabyt3's Avatar
L0rdG1gabyt3 replied the topic: #33367 26 Nov 2013 15:58
very interesting device. Because of its thickness, we can only assume that the 1TB HDD section is a single platter. That will account for its speedy performance. Ive been seeing alot of the very slim laptop drives for some time now. They are just as thick as the SATA ports.
Wingcmdr77's Avatar
Wingcmdr77 replied the topic: #33368 26 Nov 2013 16:25
Very nice. Hope more companies jump on the band wagon and get the price war going!

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