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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nitram_tpr - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Ouch, that is one expensive drive. As you say, it appears to be the ideal solution for a laptop with only a single drive bay. I think there is another option - change the HDD for an SSD and put the HDD into the optical drive bay with an adapter.ddriver - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
It is kind of expensive and kind a slow and power hungry for an SSD, but still it is essentially 2 hard drives in one. I would actually get this if the SSD part was a tiny bit better. I don't think the presence of mechanical drive in the case mandates the SSD performance be any lower. I think I will just install an extra drive in the optical drive bay, seriously DELL what were you thinking who uses optical storage in 2012?lmcd - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Me.Thanks Dell for considering :-)
ddriver - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Poor you :) I maintain about 20 TB of data, in the past the database was much smaller so I used to back it up on CDs, then DVDs, but the damn things are just too slow, unreliable, small and the cost of storage was very high. It was this moment I began hating optical storage with passion, my life got marginally better when I destroyed all optical disks and moved everything to hard drives - faster, cheaper, more compact and reliable.I know manufacturers provide installation disks which some people end up using for years, failing to realize the software on that disk is usually out of data before they even made the purchase.
And for all scenarios a hard drive is overkill there is the USB flash drive.
I guess optical storage makes some sense on consoles and/or media center PCs, if you watch many bluray or dvd movies, but for everything else... meh... and on that dell laptop it is just dead weight and battery drain.
Morawka - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Try blu ray man, blu ray's will match HDD's capacity in the near future. At present, it can already match SSD's capacity of 128GB.The blu ray tech is good up to 25 layers @ 32 GB per layer = 800 GB
Optical is far from dead when America has some of the worst bandwidth in the world.
Gigaplex - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
So I'd need 5 Blu-ray discs per hard drive, which would take 15 hours to write at 16x speed.JHBoricua - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
But what happens when one of those 4TB drives fails? Assuming you have them in a RAID array, it will probably take as long or longer for the array to rebuild, not to mention that at those capacities, the risk of another drive failing during the rebuild are simply too great if you care about your data.ddriver - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
I don't raid, I just backup. This is IMO better. I could raid something for performance but never for safety.name99 - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
Jesus, You sound like iOmega with the endless succession of ZIP and JAZ drives, or Cringely talking up his aluminum foil based drive (which still has not seen the light of day).So the best Blu-Ray could do (in drives that don't exist, using disks that don't exist) is a very slow version of a drive that I can buy for around $50?
Good luck getting rich with that particular technology.
Optical is dead dead dead. And quit whining about "worst bandwidth in the world" you drama queen. Go to a real third world country and see what really bad connectivity looks like. The only problem most Americans have is that they will have to wait five minutes for their drivers to download rather than 20 seconds. That's just not enough pain to keep optical relevant.
TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, February 1, 2014 - link
you forget the very restrictive bandwidth caps, the terrible customer service, the awful reliability, the throttling of data, the list goes on.