Conclusion

The Western Digital Black² Dual Drive is truly a unique and innovative drive. It is not a hybrid drive, but a combo drive - a combination of a solid state drive and a hard disk drive in one package. In the past, laptop users would have to choose between a small, expensive SSD or a spacious but slower HDD. With the WD Black², they can have their cake and eat it too!

Designed as a drop-in upgrade for pre-existing laptops, the WD Black² provides a fast SSD to serve as a boot drive, and a spacious hard disk drive for data storage. The SSD's 120 GB storage capacity is more than enough to store the operating system, a load of applications and even your documents. For everything else, there's a whole 1 TB of storage in the HDD.

The WD Black² functions has some peculiarities, but they are mostly technical in nature. The most important thing for users to remember is that you must download and install the special WD partitioning software to properly partition the drive into an SSD partition and a HDD partition. This is because the SSD and HDD components use a SATA bridge to communicate over a single SATA interface, making it appear (to Windows) that it's a single drive.

Other than this additional step of activating the HDD partition, installing the WD Black² is no different from the installation of any other hard disk drive. Do note that this is a 9.5 mm drive, so it won't fit thinner laptops that have 7 mm bays. Make sure your laptop supports regular 9.5 mm drives before you buy the WD Black².

Needless to say, the WD Black²'s SSD was much faster than any mobile hard disk drive in the market. Our benchmarks pegged it between the performance of the Intel 520 Series SSD and the Intel X25-M G2, which is respectable but not exceptional. It was much stronger at reads than writes when dealing with large data blocks, but the reverse was true with small accesses due to its write combine buffer.

Its HDD component, the 1 TB WD Blue Slim drive, appears to suffer some performance penalty from using the SATA bridge. Even so, it managed to about the same performance level as the regular-sized 1 TB WD Blue. It was faster in sequential accesses but slightly slower in random accesses. That's perfectly fine since the SSD will be serving as the boot drive, and handling the bulk of random accesses in the system.

There are a couple of things we didn't really fancy with this drive though. First and foremost is the higher power consumption, particularly while on standby. This will eat into the laptop's battery life. It also brings us to the second issue which is its higher thermal output - the drive runs hotter than regular hard disk drives. Western Digital should look into addressing the power consumption issue for the next version.

Finally, the WD Black² is not cheap although prices have come down to about $225 (price as of March 6th, 2014) from its initial launch price of $299. You can get a 1 TB WD Blue Slim with either the 120 GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD or the 120 GB Kingston SSDNow V300 SSD for just $206 or $182 respectively.

Despite these issues, the Western Digital Black² is a great combination of a fast SSD and a spacious HDD. It's the perfect upgrade for laptop users who want the performance of a solid state drive as well as the large storage capacity of a hard disk drive. Whether you have a dual-spindle or single-spindle laptop, the WD Black² allows you to upgrade to a SSD + HDD combo without the need to compromise anything.

For its innovative approach and outstanding combination of a fast SSD and a spacious HDD, we award it our Reviewer's Choice Award! Congratulations, Western Digital!

Find the lowest current prices on the Western Digital Black² dual drive on Amazon or Pricegrabber!

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