I don’t know about you, but when I build a new PC I basically plan for an SSD for my operating system and then a second drive or more for my Steam and other files. This has been fairly consistent in my builds from the “Fridge” with its double SSD’s and double spinning drives all the way to the most recent “lunchbox 3” with its SSD and hard drive. I even do the same thing on my gaming laptop. Sadly, there are a lot of people who just can’t do this with their laptops do to only having one drive space. Western Digital surprised us late last week with a game changing drive that has that situation in mind without going with a hybrid setup. That drive is their new WD Black 2 Dual Drive, a single drive that houses a 120GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive.

Product Name: WD Black 2 Dual Drive

Review Sample Provided by: Western Digital

Written by: Wes

Picture by: Wes

 

Specifications

Capacity

120GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Model number

WD1001X06XDTL

Interface

SATA 6 Gb/s

Form factor

2.5-inch

Advanced Format (AF)

Yes

RoHS compliant

Yes

Performance (SSD)

Data transfer rates

Interface speed

Internal transfer rate (read, max)

Internal transfer rate (write, max)

6 Gb/s

350 MB/s

140 MB/s

Reliability/Data Integrity

Load/unload cycles

600,000

Non-recoverable read errors per bits read

<1 in 10

Limited warranty (years)

5

Power Management

Average power requirements (W)

 Read/Write

Idle

Standby/Sleep

1.8

0.9

0.9

Environmental Specifications

Temperature (°C)

Operating

Non-operating

0 to 60

-40 to 70

   

Shock (Gs)

Operating (2 ms, write)

Operating (2 ms, read)

Non-operating (2 ms)

30

65

350

Acoustics (dBA)6

Idle

Seek (average)

20

21

Physical Dimensions

Height (in./mm, max)

0.374/9.50

Length (in./mm, max)

3.95/100.30

Width (in./mm, ± .01 in.)

2.75/69.85

Weight (lb./kg, ± 10%)

0.28/0.125

 

 


Packaging

Let’s be honest, how often does a company have a chance to introduce product that creates its own class. This is especially rare in the fairly stagnant hard drive market. Sure other companies have hybrid drives, but the Black 2 is a whole new beast. Because of that Western Digital went all out with its packaging starting right on the outside. The cover of the box has the back half of a formula 1 car made out of hard drive parts and if you pull the inside box out it completes the picture with the other half of the car. Those of you who spend a lot of time online may have seen the pictures of the real F1 car made out of hard drive parts as well.

image 1

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Inside of the second box the first thing you will find is a start key made of paper with a USB drive built into it. In order for the Black 2 too work, you will need this key so hang onto it. The rest of the documentation included a thick installation guide and technical support and warranty guide.

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The Black 2 also comes with a full USB 3.0 SATA adapter for you to transfer your old files over to your fresh new drive quickly.

image 4

Lastly the Black 2 comes sealed in a static free bag, interestingly enough this is the first time I have ever seen the drive logo right on the bag as well.

image 5

 


Our Testing Procedures and Test Rig

Procedures

Iometer

Random 4K/QD30 IOPS

CrystalDiskMark

Read Seq and Write Seq tests

AS SSD 

Copy Benchmark with ISO, Program, and Game results

Passmark 

Advanced disk benchmark file server, Web Server, Workstation, and Database benchmarks

Test Rig

Motherboard

Asus Maximus V Gene Motherboard

Ram

Crucial Ballistix Tracer Ram 1600Mhz 2x2Gb

CPU

Intel i7-3770K

Heatsink

Noctua NH-C14 heatsink

Power Supply

Cooler Master Silent Pro M 850Watt PSU

Video Card

XFX R7970 DD Black Edition Overclocked

Test Bench

Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench

 

 


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.

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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.

software1

software2

 

 


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.

graph1

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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.

graph2

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

graph4

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.

graph5

 


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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