The WD Black2 Review: World's First 2.5" Dual-Drive
by Kristian Vättö on January 30, 2014 7:00 AM ESTFinal Words
There are two conditions in which the Black2 makes sense:
1) You have a laptop with a single 2.5" hard drive bay and no mSATA slot
2) You need more capacity than 480/512GB and/or aren't willing to pay for a 500GB class SSD.
If your answer to both questions is a 'yes', the Black2 is likely the best option in the market right now. However, if you answered 'no' to either of the questions, there are far better and cheaper options available.
If your laptop can take two 2.5" drives or a 2.5" drive and an mSATA SSD, it's much cheaper to go that route. As the table below shows, a 120GB SSD and a 1TB 2.5" hard drive costs almost half of what the Black2 does.
| NewEgg Price Comparison (1/28/2014) | ||
| Cost | ||
| WD Black2 120GB SSD + 1TB HDD | $290 | |
| Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB + HGST Travelstar 1TB 5400rpm | $85 + $65 = $150 | |
| Crucial M500 120GB mSATA + HGST Travelstar 1TB 5400rpm | $80 + $65 = $145 | |
By buying separate drives you are also given the option to choose the SSD and HDD in case you want a higher performance SSD or prefer a certain brand HDD. Even if you went with a high-end SSD like the 120GB SanDisk Extreme II, you would end up saving over $50. In fact you could easily buy a 240GB SSD and still easily beat the Black2 in price.
If you don't need more than 240/256GB of SSD storage, the solution is simple: buy an SSD and use it as primary storage. As a matter of fact, Crucial is currently having a sale on the M500 and the 480GB model is retailing for $270 in NewEgg, $20 less than what the Black2 costs. This might be just a short-term sale but lately I've seen many 480/512GB drives selling at ~$300, so the Black2 really only makes sense if you need more than 480/512GB.
Don't get me wrong; I like the concept of the Black2 but the execution and timing are not the best. Had the Black2 been released two years ago, I would've been all over it. Back then mSATA was still rather new and most OEMs hadn't adopted it yet, but nowadays nearly all decent laptops have an mSATA slot that makes a dual-drive or hybrid drive redundant.
Furthermore, the SSD in the Black2 is only mediocre, although I must say I wasn't expecting much in the first place. There must be a reason why none of the big OEMs have adopted JMicron's controllers and I think performance is one of the top reasons. If the Black2 sees another generation, I certainly hope WD focuses more on the SSD performance (maybe Marvell silicon?) because the truth is that there are far better SSDs in the market. Couple that with the pricing and high power draw and we're really looking at a very niche product.
If there is one thing WD should have done in the Black2, that would be caching (or tiered storage). The reason why people usually have negative thoughts about caching is because the solutions are always crippled by small, low performance SSDs. The Black2 has enough NAND to make the caching experience smooth and with the right software the Black2 could have been similar to Apple's Fusion Drive. I'm currently testing a development version of software that will bring Fusion Drive like tiered storage to Windows and it works with the Black2 as well, but until it becomes available (and hopefully WD bundles it with the Black2), the biggest potential of the Black2 is missed.
At $199 and with proper caching software, the Black2 would be a totally different product. Right now it's an expensive niche product that only serves a small user base. If you meet the two conditions at the top, then I have no problem recommending the Black2 but otherwise you should look elsewhere.
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piroroadkill - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
I don't know what WD was thinking with this product, I read other reviews before..A terrible SSD and a normal HDD with no caching....
... For a price that's equal to buying a Samsung 840 Evo 500GB. This product has no purpose.
RealBeast - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
"(the first generation 80GB Intel X-25M cost $595) and performance wasn't much better than what hard drives offered"Nonsense, the X-25M was a huge improvement on HDDs and it got the whole SSD thing going. I replaced 4 RAID 0 Raptors for my OS with an X-25M at around $450 and never looked back.
I still use my original three X-25M drives as Adobe scratch drives and they are going strong well beyond 150GB of writes to each. I doubt that my current 250/256-480/500GB OS drives will outlive them.
Black 2 makes sense for laptops with only one slot, no real place for it in desktops unless the prices gets competitive to 2 drives.
Kristian Vättö - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
I didn't specifically mean the X-25M, I just used it as a pricing example. It was one of the first SSDs that didn't suck but some of the SSDs before it were truly horrible and could barely compete with hard drives.xrror - Monday, February 3, 2014 - link
The irony is guess who made the controllers on many of those early drives that sucked? ;)Frallan - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
To little to lateThis is just 2 bad drives in one package - combining the bad of both sides - and expensive to boot.
Just my 0.02€
name99 - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
Of course on a Mac the smart thing to do would immediately be to run core storage to fuse the two "partitions" together to give a genuine hybrid drive with genuine hybrid performance.If WD had the slightest intelligence, they would cobble together some basic program that could do all this automatically --- set up the appropriate partition table, set the partition types, then run diskutil cs to perform the fuse operation. Mac users may be less numerous than Windows users, but they also tend to have more money to spend on peripherals... But they're not going to spend all that glorious money that has made Apple so rich on companies that treat the like second class citizens...
stratum - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
Does this work under Linux?jeffbd - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
Doesn't work on Linux without requiring access to a Windows OS? Pass. I was going to buy this too. Oh well. I'll stick to my dual drive using dual components method for now.Horsepower - Saturday, February 1, 2014 - link
My desktop system has no internal hard drive, just a removeable rack which I use for booting to different drives. My most recent refresh included a Seagate SSHD with only slight HDD performance increase (over previous Velociraptor(s). This could be useful for my setup.0ldman79 - Tuesday, February 4, 2014 - link
I just keep thinking about data recovery on the mechanical drive.If a driver is required to access the 1TB spinner then exactly how are we suppose to use various low level data recovery tools?
I can't see recommending this to my customers. I'm a bit nervous about using one for anything other than a gaming rig.