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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apoe - Friday, February 7, 2014 - link
People think US internet speeds are slow? When I lived in China, 50 kb/s was considered really fast. In the US, with a standard ISP, I can download Steam games at 6 MB / s, 120 times faster. According to Forbes, the US is in the top 10 for fastest internet speeds, but nothing tops South Korea. Helpful that plenty of larger datacenters are located here too.xKrNMBoYx - Tuesday, February 4, 2014 - link
Try downloading a game or program that is 20-50+ GB constantly. That eats bandwidth and datacap. With out optical drives your left having to download everything or do multi step transfer from disk to computer to another computer. There are external optical drives but that is another story. There will never be a time where optical drives become obsolete until ISP invest more in speed/reliability with lower prices. Then there's the group of people that wouldn't use the internet either.JMcGrath - Sunday, February 9, 2014 - link
@Morawka -Forget Blu Ray, it will be left far behind in the (fairly) near future. I won't go as far as saying that BD is obsolete or going to be for quite a while, BD has far too much influence in the current movie industry or in the near future - even with 4K already hitting the markets a lot faster than people ever thought possible.
However, as other people have stated BD is simply not a feasible solution going forward. It has served it's purpose for many years now, but just like CD and DVD better technologies will replace it with larger and faster storage mediums.
I think it's too hard to say what will become the dominant technology in the near future, and hopefully we won't have to go through another BD vs HD-DVD type war again(!) but there are a number of different technologies in the works, many of which have already shown working prototypes to replace the aging BD tech.
Most of these tech's have gone with either smaller track widths and laser technologies, additional layers or a combination of the two. However, there is one new technology that sounds very promising, and one I believe (and hope) will become the adopted standard - Holographic Discs!
As the focus on ultra high resolutions and the aim for "retina" type displays, deeper color depths and shading, and higher true refresh rates (4K/60 or 4K/120 for example) new technologies will be needed. Most internet connections - even the fastest available in most areas - won't support these extreme bitrates, and BD simply can't keep up either.
I have seen demo's of everything from true 24-bit color panels, 60hz and 120hz 4K via HDMI 2.0 or DP 1.2+, multi-panel / multi-head displays de-multiplexed (demuxed) showing true 23:9 content at 11280x4320P @ 120hz using multiple DP/HDMI connections.
When talking about just the current standard 4K/30 on an RGB 4:4:4, 12-bit panel, you're talking about:
3840 * 2160 * 36 * 30 = 8,957,952,000 bps / 8 = 373,248,000 bytes/s...
=1.04GB/s, that's 3.67TB/hour (uncompressed, true 2160P)!!
That's 62.6GB / minute or just over 7.33TB for a 2 hour long movie, and this is excluding audio!!
Now, add in new technologies (coming very soon) like 24-bit color, 60FPS, and the *real* widescreen aspect and you're looking at closer to 367.6GB/s and 43TB for a 2 hour movie!
I haven't kept a real close eye on the holographic disc technology lately, I know it was originally created by GE (who actually had a working, but smaller 4TB/Layer, proto ~3 years ago!) The discs themselves look identical to a CD/DVD/BD, but rather than using a single laser on 1 linear track, the drive uses multiple lasers at different angles. The possibilities are really endless considering the technology itself is no different than current media, just add 2 more lasers @ 45 degrees and you increase density by 300%, add 2 more @ 30 degrees and you've increased it 500%, 2 more lasers @ 15 degrees... you get the idea.
The last I remember reading about the technology was that they had the working 4TB/Layer model that I mentioned, but were also working on using additional lasers and a finer track which would allow them as much as 40-80TB in the future!!
BD won the last round because Sony had such a large influence on the market, especially with the PS3 hitting the market at the same time as BD/HD-DVD players and HDTV's becoming mainstream. It remains to be seen what will be the driving factor this time around, but with a company as large as GE behind the wheel and the demand in large data centers for backup I think holographic discs stand a good chance at winning the next round.
For everyone out there that works in a large DC using automated tape backups or cloud based backups, imagine being able to not only store 80/160/320TB on a single disc the size of a CD but being able to do it in less than 2 hours!! Considering you could write 80TB in 2 hours and assuming they release PC writers @ 2X, 4X, 8X, etc you could backup an entire enterprise data center in less than an hour, throw it in a small fire/water proof safe, and you're done!
patrickjchase - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
This is tangential, but...I have similar backup needs, and faced similar issues with OD unreliability (and also with HDD failures for that matter). I ended up developing my own archiver that stripes backup files across multiple drives/disks (optical or HDD). It calculates and embeds strong block-level checksums, and provides RAID6-style Reed-Solomon-code based redundancy within each block-sized stripe. In particular it can tolerate up to 2 block-checksum failures in each stripe (for for example if I stripe across 7 Blu-Ray disks I can tolerate read errors from any 2 within any given block-sized stripe), which means that it can tolerate a *lot* of optical disk read errors. I intentionally degraded (read: scratched up) a backup set such that every disk yielded a very large number of read errors, but the backup payload as a whole was recoverable.
With that in mind, I find that optical (Blu-Ray) media remain very useful for backups due to their superior shock/vibration/environmental tolerance as compared to hard drives. If I were using them without my archiver I'd be pretty worried, though :-).
Navvie - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
I'd be very, very interested in seeing this software!Solandri - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
We did that on Usenet in the 1990s. When posting a big binary (e.g. a TV show episode) you had to break it up into multiple parts to fit within the Usenet post length limit. So you might break the TV show into 50 compressed archive files (usually RAR). The problem was Usenet would frequently fail to propagate a file. So even though you posted 50, many sites might only get 49 or 47. The solution was to add parity files. So you'd post the original 50 archive files (RAR) and 5 parity files (PAR).Any 50 of those 55 files would allow you to recreate the original video file. You could vary the number of parity files, but about 10% was typical.
When I was backing up stuff to DVD, I found and downloaded newer versions of the old parity programs. I broke up my backups into enough archive files and parity files that I could lose large portions of several disks, or even an entire disk and still recover my backup. Your block-level parity checksums sounds like it would be more robust and transparent, but I only had to use freely downloadable tools.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_file
Navvie - Monday, February 3, 2014 - link
When I read patrickjchase's comment my first thought was "that's exactly like usenet."peter64 - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
Yes, thank you Dell for making devices are easily user upgraded. I hate all these other notebooks being completely sealed. You can't even replace the battery.peter64 - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
I bet if Dell didn't put that removable optical drive in there, your notebook won't have a 2nd hard drive at all.Thanks Dell for giving people options and post-purchase upgrade ability during times of sealed non-user upgradeable devices.
Johnmcl7 - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
I think it would have been the ideal solution for a single drive perhaps last year but I think it's too late and too expensive as the Crucial M500 960GB is now under £330. While that's still a bit more expensive than this drive it's much neater (one drive instead of two) and I assume power consumption and heat would be better as well. That's the option I'd go for on a machine now, if they'd managed a 2TB drive for this price it would be a lot more attractive as that would put it beyond what's affordable with SSD's at the moment. I realise there are technical difficulties with 2TB 2.5in drives (I don't know if there's any standard drives available in this capacity) but they have to move forward at some point.