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.