The WD Black2 Review: World's First 2.5" Dual-Drive
by Kristian Vättö on January 30, 2014 7:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2013
Our Storage Bench 2013 focuses on worst-case multitasking and IO consistency. Similar to our earlier Storage Benches, the test is still application trace based -- we record all IO requests made to a test system and play them back on the drive we're testing and run statistical analysis on the drive's responses. There are 49.8 million IO operations in total with 1583.0GB of reads and 875.6GB of writes.
As some of you have asked, I'm not including the full description of the test for better readability, so make sure to read our Storage Bench 2013 introduction for the full details.
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 - The Destroyer | ||||||||||||
| Workload | Description | Applications Used | ||||||||||
| Photo Sync/Editing | Import images, edit, export | Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Lightroom 4, Dropbox | ||||||||||
| Gaming | Download/install games, play games | Steam, Deus Ex, Skyrim, Starcraft 2, BioShock Infinite | ||||||||||
| Virtualization | Run/manage VM, use general apps inside VM | VirtualBox | ||||||||||
| General Productivity | Browse the web, manage local email, copy files, encrypt/decrypt files, backup system, download content, virus/malware scan | Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, AdAware | ||||||||||
| Video Playback | Copy and watch movies | Windows 8 | ||||||||||
| Application Development | Compile projects, check out code, download code samples | Visual Studio 2012 | ||||||||||
We are reporting two primary metrics with the Destroyer: average data rate in MB/s and average service time in microseconds. The former gives you an idea of the throughput of the drive during the time that it was running the Destroyer workload. This can be a very good indication of overall performance. What average data rate doesn't do a good job of is taking into account response time of very bursty (read: high queue depth) IO. By reporting average service time we heavily weigh latency for queued IOs. You'll note that this is a metric we've been reporting in our enterprise benchmarks for a while now. With the client tests maturing, the time was right for a little convergence.
Our Storage Bench 2013 favors 480GB and bigger drives due to its focus on steady-state performance. Having more NAND helps with worst case performance as ultimately steady-state performance is dictated by the speed of the read-modify-write cycle, which depends on the program and erase times of the NAND. The more NAND the drive has, the higher the probability that there is at least some empty blocks available.
When taking the lower capacity into account, the Black2 isn't terrible but it's not great either. There are some 256GB drives that perform similarly, although it should be noted that the Black2 has 12% over-provisioning instead of 7%, giving it a slight advantage there (the drives are filled with sequential data before the test after all).
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MrSpadge - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Yeah, with the current product choices and price point they're effectively betting "People, please don't buy this!" and will probably wonder about low sales at some point. Seagate introduced a 2 TB 2.5" drive with standard 9.5 mm height a few months ago - that's pretty impressive, but might not have enough space left for an mSATA SSD due to it using 3 platters.ImSpartacus - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
For $300, you could easily get a ~500GB SSD.I feel like the black2 @ $300 is only useful for people that absolutely need that extra 620GB of storage in a single 2.5" drive.
hucklongfin - Saturday, February 1, 2014 - link
I guess I'm old (and I am), but I remember paying $700 for a 70mb drive (Micropolis?) back in the late 80's and not asking too many questions because I assumed it "fell" off the back of a truck.. I put it in my ALR 386 with a 1006 1:1 controller. It was the bomb back in the day. I have a long memory so lot of stuff doesn't seem that expensive to me!Frangelina - Saturday, February 1, 2014 - link
That's what I did to my 8470p. An M4 256 and a momentus XT500 I bought a year ago at NE for $79 in a caddy for the DVD slot.Tuvok86 - Thursday, February 6, 2014 - link
This is exactly what I did years ago, upgraded to 128GB ssd and switched the cd drive with the stock 500GB hd.This thing would have been great at that time but nowadays, seriously, you can get a 500GB ssd, even preinstalled, even cheaper. Too little, too late.
philipma1957 - Thursday, February 6, 2014 - link
price is way too high . 290 for 1.12 tb storage a crucial 960gb ssd is 400 on sale a samsung 1tb ssd is 500 on sale. why pay 290 for a clearly inferior product. Now if it was 250 gb plus 1.5tb for 290 it would make some sense.twtech - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link
Even in the case where you need a lot of storage with just one bay, I'd argue that a 1TB SSD would still be a significantly superior option from a performance and power consumption standpoint, and you can buy a Samsung 840 series on Newegg right now for only a couple hundred dollars more. So that even further narrows the target market for this drive.danwat1234 - Wednesday, January 21, 2015 - link
Now it's only $130 on Newegg!!Aseries - Friday, February 20, 2015 - link
The real world price of this device is down to $128 at Amazon.tipoo - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
So being a manually managed dual disk, could someone configure this as a Fusion Drive or similar?