The WD Black2 Review: World's First 2.5" Dual-Drive
by Kristian Vättö on January 30, 2014 7:00 AM ESTRandom & Sequential Performance - HDD
The HDD performance is average, though that shouldn't surprise anyone as there hasn't been any major breakthrough in hard drive technology. The performance is still dictated by platter density and spindle speed, which puts the Black2 at the upper end with its two 500GB 5400rpm platters. I should note that as there is no way to test the hard drive partition of the Black2 as a raw disk like we usually test drives, I had to create an NTFS volume for testing. It's possible that there is some OS prefetching/caching going on, giving the Black2 an advantage especially in the random IO tests.
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Gigaplex - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Once the partitions are set, do they show up in a different Windows box that doesn't have the drivers installed? If so, they're not really drivers, they're just a one-off utility to create the partitions.arturoh - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
It does sound like the WD "driver" just sets up the partition table in MBR to point to the correct places. It'd be nice if WD provides a Linux utility or, even better, gives steps using existing Linux tools to correctly setup the MBR.arturoh - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
I'd like know if WD plans to provide a utility to set it up under Linux.Guspaz - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
SATA expanders demonstrate that most chipsets do support multiple devices per SATA port.oranos - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
SSD is pretty much standard. HDD is too much of a bottleneck in performance system now.kepstin - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
I'm rather curious whether this dual drive would show up correctly, with space from both disks available, in Linux.Not that I would pick it up, I've already gone the dual drive route with a SanDisk extreme II and a hard drive in the (former) optical bay.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
It does.Panzerknacker - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Like I said above, it should, and it's the reason I think it should not require a driver. Would be nice if this can be tested. If someone is gonna test this, please use a OLDER linux distro to make sure that there is no specific driver included.calyth - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
If they required a driver for windows so that the 2 drives shows up on the same partition table, I wouldn't count on Linux support yet.Unless WD sends a bunch to some linux hw devs ;)
Maltz - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Except that it works fine on a Mac without drivers... once it's partitioned in Windows. I suspect the driver is only important or needed in the partitioning process.