Western Digital Black² Dual Drive Review

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Another review of Western Digital's Black² Dual Drive has hit the internet today. This time around it is the folks at TechwareLabs doing the reviewing.

So, how did WD solve the mystery of getting the benefits of both an SSD and an HDD in a single drive form factor? Well, the answer is literally in the question, they managed to sandwich a 120GB SSD and a 1TB spinning drive into a single 9.5mm 2.5″ form factor drive, the Western Digital Black² Dual Drive.
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ASMedia controllers are the worst. Cause so many issues for my system under windows 7 and windows8.
 
necrosis said:
I wonder why.
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A lot of controllers have broken Port Multiplier implementations. Not sure if these do, but this device would have to rely on port multiplier to function.

I'm guessing - because you need a special driver in order to see the hard drive - that this drive is not compatible with Intel Smart Response SSD Caching?
 
yeah I would like to see WD implement a feature that a user can have an SSD Partition (not using full ssd size), a Data partition (using the platters) and the remaining SSD capacity to be used as a dynamic cache similar to seagate hybrid drives and fusion drives.

That way your OS and programs are on SSD, data on platters, and whatever you are working on can get cached to the ssd for a speed bump.
 
that sucks, couldn't install it on a ps4 because it needs windows software to locking it.
 
bloodhawke83 said:
that sucks, couldn't install it on a ps4 because it needs windows software to locking it.
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It's not locking, it's a driver, presumably for the port multiplier implementation. It would ahve been better if they had used a driver free solution though, as I don't recall needing a special driver for port multiplying eSata enclosures in the past...
 
Zarathustra[H];1040413031 said:
It's not locking, it's a driver, presumably for the port multiplier implementation. It would ahve been better if they had used a driver free solution though, as I don't recall needing a special driver for port multiplying eSata enclosures in the past...
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So that's how this thing works. Port multipliers. I was wondering how they did it.

At first I thought this was a hybrid drive like what Seagate has been selling for a while now, but its actually 2 drives in 1. When this thing is plugged into your laptop through its single SATA port, the SSD will show up as your C: drive and the 1TB HDD will show up as your D: drive.
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
So that's how this thing works. Port multipliers. I was wondering how they did it.

At first I thought this was a hybrid drive like what Seagate has been selling for a while now, but its actually 2 drives in 1. When this thing is plugged into your laptop through its single SATA port, the SSD will show up as your C: drive and the 1TB HDD will show up as your D: drive.
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Exactly. Except the D drive doesn't show up at all until after you install the driver :p Only the SSD shows up at first.
 
I find it interesting that the drive actually looks to the OS as a single disk spanning the two drives.
 
Both of the reviews show this. In device manager it shows up as a single device with two partitions (each partition having a drive letter but they are on the same device). If you delete the two partitions you can create a single partition spanning both drives. There were HD tune benchmarks showing the performance dropoff from the SSD part to the hard drive part.

http://www.techwarelabs.com/western-digital-black²-dual-drive-review-two-drives-in-one/2/

Although that may be the what the driver actually does.
 
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drescherjm said:
Both of the reviews show this. In device manager it shows up as a single device with two partitions (each partition having a drive letter but they are on the same device). If you delete the two partitions you can create a single partition spanning both drives. There were HD tune benchmarks showing the performance dropoff from the SSD part to the hard drive part.

http://www.techwarelabs.com/western-digital-black²-dual-drive-review-two-drives-in-one/2/

Although that may be the what the driver actually does.
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Very interesting. So it's definitely a rather non-standard port multiplier logic.
 
Where did you read this?

From everything I have read, they show up as two distinct drives?
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Well, there are your physical drives seen at the hardware level and your logical drives that can be spanned or not.
 
lcpiper said:
Well, there are your physical drives seen at the hardware level and your logical drives that can be spanned or not.
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Yeah, and the fact that they appear as logical drives, probably prevents most SSD caching software from working properly with it. (though I am not certain about this)
 
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