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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Kristian Vättö - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
There is no official Mac support, so maybe. I just tried using the drive in OS X and added my findings but unfortunately I don't have the tools to properly test it in a Mac.Maltz - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
To create a Fusion drive, you have to have two separate devices, not partitions. This drive shows up as a single device.name99 - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
I don't think that's true. diskutil (in the command line) is crazy tolerant of gluing all sorts of weird shit together. The GUI is much more strict.What you MIGHT have to do if first run
diskutil ar create concat ...
to convert each partition to an AR2 partition. You can then run diskutil cs to fuse these partitions together. As a general principle, whenever diskutil refuses to do something with a raw partition, wrapping it in an AR2 partition will get the job done.
Calinou__ - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
This drive is the first Windrive.Panzerknacker - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Very smart and interesting how they designed this. Considering the separation between SSD and HDD happens on LBA level and is based on the partition table, I don't understand why a driver is required though. This should work out of the box. Could you test this a bit more?Xajel - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
As they stated, it's a limitation of the SATA protocol, SATA is a point-to-point protocol, means you can't connect more than one device to the same SATA port... there's an un-required extension to the SATA protocol which is called SATA multiplier, basically it's a chip in the other hand of the SATA cable ( of course not in the cable it self ) that will take a single SATA cable and connect it to multiple drives... though it's not available in all chipsets as it's not required...I still hope WD will come with another version with such support, or who knows, maybe a small switch to select between which mode you want, but that will require more space for such switching... but my main concern with these approaches is when one of the drives fails ( after warranty goes )... you will loose a hell !!
In the mean while, I feel the best solution is to find a laptop with both mSATA and 2.5" SATA so you will not worry about one of the drives failing and you loose both...
Panzerknacker - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
No this is not true. As they stated, separation between the SSD and HDD happens INSIDE the drive, by means of a system which sends I/0 targeted at the first 120gb of the drive's sectors to the SSD, and I/0 targeted at the rest of the sectors to the HDD. The system in which the Black 2 is installed should see only one 1120GB disk with 2 partitions (default). I don't understand why this would require a driver because the system does NOT know or need to know what's going on inside the drive as long as you don't mess with the default partition layout.DanNeely - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
The 2 partitions in one drive thing only happens after the drivers are installed. It's implemented using port multiplication which means that it has 2 different drives hanging off a single sata port. Some older computers didn't come with support for it, so WD used the looks like only a 120GB drive by default kludge for wider spread compatibility.While I understand the need for back compatibility, and wouldn't have a problem if they defaulted to legacy support; I do wish they provided an option either in a configuration app or via a jumper selection that would let it expose itself as a pair of port multiplied drives for systems that do support the feature without having to go through WDs indirection layer.
extide - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Yeah but thats not the case. Panzerknacker is right. If it truly was port multiplication then the computer would see two individual drives. Instead it sees one big one. Theoretically it should be able to work without a driver and show up as a single drive, its kinda like a JBOD of the SSD + HDD built into the drive. That shouldn't need any drivers.Also, is there linux support for this?
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Not officially but once the partitions have been set in Windows they show up fine in Linux and OS X.