The WD Black2 Review: World's First 2.5" Dual-Drive

Final 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.

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.