The WD Black2 Review: World's First 2.5" Dual-Drive
by Kristian Vättö on January 30, 2014 7:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2013
Our Storage Bench 2013 focuses on worst-case multitasking and IO consistency. Similar to our earlier Storage Benches, the test is still application trace based -- we record all IO requests made to a test system and play them back on the drive we're testing and run statistical analysis on the drive's responses. There are 49.8 million IO operations in total with 1583.0GB of reads and 875.6GB of writes.
As some of you have asked, I'm not including the full description of the test for better readability, so make sure to read our Storage Bench 2013 introduction for the full details.
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 - The Destroyer | ||||||||||||
| Workload | Description | Applications Used | ||||||||||
| Photo Sync/Editing | Import images, edit, export | Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Lightroom 4, Dropbox | ||||||||||
| Gaming | Download/install games, play games | Steam, Deus Ex, Skyrim, Starcraft 2, BioShock Infinite | ||||||||||
| Virtualization | Run/manage VM, use general apps inside VM | VirtualBox | ||||||||||
| General Productivity | Browse the web, manage local email, copy files, encrypt/decrypt files, backup system, download content, virus/malware scan | Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, AdAware | ||||||||||
| Video Playback | Copy and watch movies | Windows 8 | ||||||||||
| Application Development | Compile projects, check out code, download code samples | Visual Studio 2012 | ||||||||||
We are reporting two primary metrics with the Destroyer: average data rate in MB/s and average service time in microseconds. The former gives you an idea of the throughput of the drive during the time that it was running the Destroyer workload. This can be a very good indication of overall performance. What average data rate doesn't do a good job of is taking into account response time of very bursty (read: high queue depth) IO. By reporting average service time we heavily weigh latency for queued IOs. You'll note that this is a metric we've been reporting in our enterprise benchmarks for a while now. With the client tests maturing, the time was right for a little convergence.
Our Storage Bench 2013 favors 480GB and bigger drives due to its focus on steady-state performance. Having more NAND helps with worst case performance as ultimately steady-state performance is dictated by the speed of the read-modify-write cycle, which depends on the program and erase times of the NAND. The more NAND the drive has, the higher the probability that there is at least some empty blocks available.
When taking the lower capacity into account, the Black2 isn't terrible but it's not great either. There are some 256GB drives that perform similarly, although it should be noted that the Black2 has 12% over-provisioning instead of 7%, giving it a slight advantage there (the drives are filled with sequential data before the test after all).
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chizow - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
Hmm yeah you're right, I didn't know this was priced so high at $290 and 1TB SSDs are in that $500-600 range now from what I've seen.This would probably need to drop down to ~$180 to be worthwhile, based on pricing of a 120SSD ($80ish) and 1TB 2.5" HDD ($80) with a small premium for combined slot.
Braumin - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
This is a bit silly. If they had gone to the trouble of merging the two into a single logical unit, it would make more sense.As you rightly pointed out - it makes little sense to anyone. If you need more space, you can do that in so many other ways...
This needed to be like the Fusion drive or it's DOA.
Mayuyu - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Dead on Arrival. Device makers don't believe that consumers can handle a file manager. WD thinks people want to separate their files between a hard drive and a SSD?mikato - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
I'm not giving it to my parents, that's for sure. They only get single drive systems. It may be an SSD if they keep dropping in price.speculatrix - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Am I the only person who on seeing the picture of someone holding the nSATA card by its connector thinks "well, that's part ruined... likely to die early from ESD, or corrosion on the edge connector"?Gigaplex - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
The devices held like that for marketing purposes are often defective parts already.Gasaraki88 - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
I'm not seeing the point of this drive. Why don't I get a 128SSD and a 1TB drive separately?Gasaraki88 - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
They should have made this a hybrid drive. That would have been awesome, 128GB SSD cache with a 1TB spinning disk.kmmatney - Monday, February 3, 2014 - link
The Seagate Momentus XTs are already pretty nice with an 8 GB cache (I have 2 of the older models with 4GB cache, and even those are "pretty good"). So a hybrid with this much cache could be awesome. I don't think the hybrid drives cache writes, so that would limit performance. I'm on the fence with this - I think it needs to be priced around $200 to be more interesting.mr_tawan - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Some people on a laptop does only have 1 bay for 2.5" drive available, with no mSATA socket whatsoever. Given that larger SSD is still quite expensive, you might have to choose between having a speedy system with no room for storage, and a plenty of space but slow as snail.These people might go with SSD and a USB3 HDD, of course, but carrying another external drive makes the system bit less mobile.
If the laptop has optical drive, then you might swap it with a 2.5" drive caddy. But it does not, well this might be a good option.
Too bad the drive does not really perform, and it's pretty pricey. I'd have gone with a drive caddy and a external bluray drive :-(.