Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive

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PC Perspective has one of those new Western Digital Black2 dual drives that combines a 120GB SSD and a 1TB HDD in a 2.5" package on the test bench today.

Western Digital has certainly broken the mold here. No longer are you stuck with either an SSD or HDD. You're not stuck with a cached HDD, either. Now you can have a full blown SSD with 1TB of HDD storage, all in one package that fits into a single laptop HDD bay! The new JMicron controller may not be the best performer out there, but it is definitely competitive where it matters. The linking of SSD and HDD into a single logical device may be confusing at first, but it makes sense once you wrap your head around the concept.
 
I just saw this drive listed on Newegg. Had to scratch my head when I saw only one data and one power connector. Went to WD's website where they talk about it a little more. Lots of limitations, no RAID, etc. Interesting concept.
 
Wow. This wasn't on my radar, but now I want one. Further justification for getting an Ultrabook that takes a standard drive.
 
Seems like a novel idea as the SSD portion is at least large enough to be useful. Not sure I'd ever go this route myself, but I think it could be nice for some situations.
 
Curious if this supports anything other than Windows, Linux in particular.
 
This solves my conundrum with my laptop. It has one 2.5" bay and no support for mSATA SSDs. I'd have to ditch my optical drive (which I refuse to do) in order to load a second 2.5" drive.

Now I don't need a second 2.5" drive--120GB is fine because the only thing that really needs acceleration on my laptop is the OS and a few programs.
 
$300 is kind of a turnoff though. Looks ideal for lappies and/or sff systems.
 
This solves my conundrum with my laptop. It has one 2.5" bay and no support for mSATA SSDs. I'd have to ditch my optical drive (which I refuse to do) in order to load a second 2.5" drive.

Now I don't need a second 2.5" drive--120GB is fine because the only thing that really needs acceleration on my laptop is the OS and a few programs.

I really wish this thing had been around when I bought the 512GB SSD for my wife and I's laptops, I would much rather have 120GB for the OS and applications and 1TB of conventional storage for all the misc crap that doesn't need fast access. It's cheaper than the SSD I bought as well.
 
I actually just bought one of these.

Going to replace my 500gb laptop drive. 120gb SSD is more than enough for windows and few key programs, and then the 1tb of space is just icing on the cake so to speak.

Very nice product in a great position for laptop owners who have a single hard-drive bay.
 
Sounds like this is a bit too late to the game, besides $300 sounds much on a high side for this. If the embedded SSD was faster, maybe it would help a bit. This product also leave a big question mark on data recover or if one or the other half dies in which case you lose both. One can get a 512GB SSD for that same $300 so while it isn't same storage, it will be faster. I personally would rather have less storage that is reliable than a contraption like this.
 
Seems like a novel idea as the SSD portion is at least large enough to be useful. Not sure I'd ever go this route myself, but I think it could be nice for some situations.

To me it would seem ideal for laptops, where you can usually only fit one drive.

I've had to put smaller drives than I am comfortable with in some friends and family laptops, because it meant a choice between small SSD and large hard drive at the price point.

I'd definitely put something like this in a laptop, as it's the best of both worlds, but it's just too expensive IMHO.

At this price point, I could get a 500GB SSD. Sure its smaller, but large enough for a laptop IMHO (unless said laptop is your only computer)

Considering it's a rather low end SSD, I would expect the price for a drive like this to be about half of what they are selling it for.
 
I myself dont care but i know ill be installing a few of them in environments that benefit.
 
I myself dont care but i know ill be installing a few of them in environments that benefit.

I would do the same, if only it were cheaper. At $300 it's way overpriced. At $150 - $160, however, I'd do it, and this price is only going to come down as SSD's get cheaper and cheaper.
 
Zarathustra[H];1040413044 said:
I would do the same, if only it were cheaper. At $300 it's way overpriced. At $150 - $160, however, I'd do it, and this price is only going to come down as SSD's get cheaper and cheaper.

Intel 530 120GB SSD - $120
WD Red 2.5" 1TB HDD - $100

So it costs 220 to do that previously. So if i can combine the two together for 80 more dollars then i dont see the problem. Laptops do not usually have 2 hard drive bays so you get 2 drives in one. For those that do then you get 3 drives in one or 4 drives in one if you get two WD Black²
 
I can confirm some information on these now that they are released.

They are incredible, I was getting 400-500MB reads and writes on the SSD drive and about 140-200 on the platter side in beta testing of them.

They really are kickass units, I have mine in a i3 laptop and it made the entire thing feel like an i7 system.

A shade on the pricey side, but I assure you, the performance is real.
 
Intel 530 120GB SSD - $120
WD Red 2.5" 1TB HDD - $100

So it costs 220 to do that previously. So if i can combine the two together for 80 more dollars then i dont see the problem. Laptops do not usually have 2 hard drive bays so you get 2 drives in one. For those that do then you get 3 drives in one or 4 drives in one if you get two WD Black²



True, but the SSD in this thing is hardly on the level of an Intel 520. It's a low end SSD, I'd say more like a $80 120GB Adata drive. And why are you price comparing a WD Red? That's a drive intended for RAID enclosures. Compare it to a 1TB 2.5" 5400rpm WD drive, and you'll find that costs about $80 as well. So $160.

But now you are buying them both from WD, so just like how a 512GB drive doesn't cost twice of what a 256GB drive does, since they are a bundle, I expect them to come with a slight savings.


But not only that.

Let's compare it to what else is out there. For the ~$300 they want for this, I could get a 512GB Samsung 840 Evo SSD today. Granted that's less space, but I'd chose that first in a heartbeat.

There certainly is a market for this drive, but it has to be at the right price.
 
Zarathustra[H];1040413484 said:
Let's compare it to what else is out there. For the ~$300 they want for this, I could get a 512GB Samsung 840 Evo SSD today. Granted that's less space, but I'd chose that first in a heartbeat.

There certainly is a market for this drive, but it has to be at the right price.

If you did what I just did end of last month, there's a strong use case for this in a desktop too.

I bought an 840 Evo 250GB and a Seagate 2TB 3.5" SSHD (with the tiny 8GB cache) for my upgrade build. The combined price of those two products is roughly the same as the WD Black2 RRP, and I suspect in average usage scenarios where people dip into the "storage" drive a fair amount on the two discrete drives, the Black2 would turn out to be faster overall. It'd be an even bigger delta with a more conventional HDD.

Sure, you sacrifice some SSD potential speeds, but that's not that big a deal for most people.

Hell, I can't tell any significant speed differences in real world usage between my 840 EVO and my old Crucial M4 256 SSD, even though on paper and in benchmarks the Evo is far faster.

I can feel the seconds difference between a SSD and HD, but I have a hard time feeling milliseconds when loading from or writing to disk on two different SSDs. :)
 
and about 140-200 on the platter side in beta testing of them.

Interesting. Is that a single platter then? I mean 200 MB/s STR is a great performance for a platter drive. I have seen enterprise 3.5 inch drives do that and also 1TB 3.5 inch 7200 RPM platter drives do that but certainly not laptop drives.
 
There are a lot of niche markets. For the most part a HD maker will not market a product unless there is at least a niche market that will support it.

---

This product does not appeal to me.
 
Interesting. Is that a single platter then? I mean 200 MB/s STR is a great performance for a platter drive. I have seen enterprise 3.5 inch drives do that and also 1TB 3.5 inch 7200 RPM platter drives do that but certainly not laptop drives.

I haven't see a platter drive get over 200mb/s

I have a brand new Segate Barracuda 7200rpm 2tb drive, and I get 179mb/s in crystal disk. Highest performing platter drive I've ever had.

200mb/s on a platter drive is either a WD raptor 10k 1tb, or a few select SCSI Ultra 320 drives.

On a side note I got my Black2 Dual drive last night via ups. In the process of installing it in my laptop now.
 
I have seen high 180s to high 190s in STR from Seagate 1TB per platter drives along with enterprise constellation ES3 drives. This is in the very outer tracks on initial testing. I have not seen 200+ myself..

Here is a constellation es.3 2TB. It's part of an active array at work so this is not the best benchmark..

Code:
fileserver1 ~ # dd if=/dev/sdl of=/dev/null bs=8M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
8388608000 bytes (8.4 GB) copied, 44.376 s, 189 MB/s
 
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Personally I never really pay attention to sequential read/write speeds, as they are mostly irrelevant for my workloads.

Seek times and 4k type loads are more interesting IMHO.

That being said, my 6 disk FreeNAS array gives me ~490MB/s, but that is a completely different monster, for a completely different application than this drive :p
 
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