Overall and Final Verdict

Now that we have taken a look at the performance of the Black 2 as well as what makes it such a unique and innovative product we need to step back and look at the big picture. First, what are the benefits to the drive? Well as someone who loves building small form factor PC builds I could see the drive coming in handy, but specifically I can see a lot of OEMs looking at the Black 2 to save space in small laptop designs that can’t fit two drives. That means that some devices won’t be limited to picking a fast SSD or having enough storage capacity to not have to worry about running out quickly. To go along with that, the only other option to get both speed and capacity would be to buy a very large SSD and although prices are dropping, you could buy an entire laptop for the price of an SSD with the same capacity of the Black 2. The only other option would be a hybrid drive, but I do think that this is a better solution as it gives you full control over what is on the SSD.

Having said all of that, there are a few very big downsides to the Black 2 as well. Specifically, the Black 2 has a very limited market in my opinion. You are limited to a windows PC only and you can’t run it on a few big name hard drive controllers for one, but just as significantly I think that the need for a double drive in a single drive space is only limited to small laptops and devices. The larger gaming laptops that people expect to get both an SSD and a hard drive will still have space for both, although this drive does open up the possibility of those laptops saving space and getting smaller. The other factor will be its price. At just under $300 MRSP at launch, as of right now you can pick up a 1TB hard drive for around $100 and a comparable 120GB SSD for $100 as well. I expect there to be a price difference but that is fairly significant. I really hope that Western Digital refines the process and lowers the price or increases the capacity of the Black 2 to make it a little more competitive in the market.

Having said all of that, in a situation like our recent Lunchbox 3 build. The black 2 would fit in perfectly. Much like our build, Western Digital was trying to pack the best possible performance and capacity into the smallest possible form factor. With that in mine I do think they were successful. I just hope they stick at it and work it better into the marketplace.

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Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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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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