Introduction, Specifications and Packaging

Western Digital releases a 2.5-in drive that includes both a full capacity SSD and a 1TB hard drive. What??

Introduction:

If you're into the laptop storage upgrade scene, you hear the same sort of arguments all the time. "Do I go with a HDD for a large capacity and low cost/GB, but suffer performance"? "I want an SSD, but can't afford the capacity I need"! The ideal for this scenario is to combine both – go with a small capacity SSD for your operating system and apps, while going with a larger HDD for bulk storage at a lower cost/GB. The catch here is that most mobile platforms only come with a single 2.5" 9.5mm storage bay, and you just can't physically fit a full SSD and a full HDD into that space, can you? Well today Western Digital has answered that challenge with the Black2 Dual Drive:

Yup, we're not kidding. This is a 120GB SSD *and* a 1TB HDD in a single package. Not a hybrid. Two drives, and it's nothing short of a work of art.

Continue reading our review of the Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive!!

Specifications:

Specs are a tad complicated here. WD lists the rated throughput of the SSD portion on their spec sheet:

  • Interface: 6Gb/s
  • Read: 350 MB/s
  • Write: 140 MB/s

That's all good and fine, but we also might want to know the specs on the HDD portion. I'm going to see into the future and predict that it's a WD10SPCX 1TB Slim Series HDD, which is technically a Blue drive spinning at 5400 RPM. Here are the relevant specs for that drive:

  • Interface: 6Gb/s
  • Transfer rate (max): 140 MB/s
  • Average latency: 5.5 ms
  • Cache: 16 MB

Much more on the internals on the following pages of this review.

Packaging:

WD has taken a wild departure from their normal packaging with the Black2:

Included is a USB key that is ironically not a storage device – it simply acts as a virtual keyboard and launches the WD Black2 web site (this link) so you can download the most recent version of the driver as well as cloning software. Also included is a detailed quick start guide book (in 20+ languages) and a USB to SATA adapter for OS cloning purposes.

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