It'due south no secret that difficult drives -- with or without RAID -- have long been the weakest link of an enthusiast PC but until somewhat recently flash-based alternatives weren't affordable enough for the masses. In 2009, SSDs including OCZ'due south original Vertex were fetching $3.00 per gigabyte or about $350 for a 120GB model, quite a bit more than than a 2TB hard drive at the fourth dimension, which were going for as little every bit $0.06 per gigabyte.

Prices have dropped significantly since then, with loftier-end SSDs such as the Samsung SSD 840 Evo costing every bit piffling as $0.75 per gigabyte for a 120GB version. That's still a serious premium over a disk bulldoze such as the Western Digital Black 3TB, which merely costs $0.06 per gigabyte, while 2.5" laptop drives such as the WD Blueish 1TB can exist had for $0.09 a gig. This discrepancy can make it hard to balance speed and space.

Granted, the toll gap isn't as extreme as it one time was, simply many folks are all the same stuck with the limitations of one technology or the other. Laptop users, for instance, are often forced to pick between a snappier experience with less storage or a slower one with more. About $100 can buy a 120GB SSD or a 1TB HDD, merely we're even so dreaming about flash drives that match the price and capacity of conventional storage.

In the concurrently, WD has come with a solution for laptop users who have a unmarried 2.5" bay (which is the vast majority of them). The company has adult a notebook drive that sports both a 120GB SSD and a 1TB HDD, though it's not a standard hybrid configuration such as Seagate's Momentus XT drives, which combine ample magnetic storage with a little NAND retention to cache frequently used data.

Those types of setups are a definite improvement over conventional HDDs, simply they are considerably slower at most tasks than a full-blown SSD. The Black2 crams both technologies into one bulldoze too, simply information technology simply does what desktop users accept been doing for years past making the flash portion a primary boot drive with the disks serving every bit majority storage. The deviation is that the Black2 merely uses a single slot.

At $300, it works out to be $0.27 per gigabyte when you lot account for the full 1.2TB capacity, or less than half the price of a Samsung SSD 840 Evo 120GB and not that much more than the $0.09 per gigabyte y'all pay for a standard 1TB two.5" bulldoze when you consider in that location is a 120GB SSD in the package. As always, we're hither to find out what the heck that quarter per gigabyte buys you operation-wise.

WD Black2 Hybrid HDD in Item

In terms of dimensions, the WD Black2 looks like any other 2.v" drive, measuring 100.20 x 69.85 10 9.50mm and weighing just 125g. However, its aesthetics vary in that information technology isn't fully enclosed in steel or aluminum. Instead, it has a thin PCB on the underside, office of which features the 120GB SSD.

When operating, WD says the Black2 consumes just one.8W and 0.9W when idling or comatose. Because information technology'southward not just an SSD, the bulldoze tin just handle 30Gs or 350Gs of daze when non-operational, whereas SSDs can safely handle up to 1500Gs as they don't have moving parts.

Squeezing an SSD and HDD into one tiny package isn't easy and as a consequence, the drive is nine.5mm thick while most 2.5" drives are now just 7mm.

On the underneath side of the Black2 we find what looks more like a traditional hard drive with a small PCB attached to the housing featuring a pair of 500GB platters. This PCB has a Marvell SATA bridge chip to let the single SATA interface communicate to both the SSD and HDD through the same partition mapping.

Nosotros found the SSD portion of the drive after removing its acme layer, which is secured using four pocket-size screws and plenty of double-sided tape. WD outfitted the Black2 with a JMicron 667H controller, two 64GB MLC NAND fries and a Nanya DRAM enshroud chip.

The controller choice is interesting equally JMicron doesn't take the best reputation. Although information technology'southward been a while since we tested an SSD using one of the company's controllers and nosotros don't have any experience with this specific role, all previous JMicron controllers have been lackluster.

As you would expect, the JMicron 667H supports SATA 6Gb/due south, allowing for a read throughput of 350MB/s and a write speed of 140MB/south. Both figures are quite low for a modern SSD every bit Samsung'southward Evo 120GB boasts read and write rates of 540MB/s and 410MB/s.

The HDD besides supports SATA 6Gb/south, though it has a maximum transfer speed of 140MB/s with an average latency of 5.5ms.

Since the Black2 is designed primarily for laptops with ane 2.5" drive slot, migrating your data from your existing laptop bulldoze to the new one should be streamlined. WD has included a very useful USB to SATA adapter cable for Bone cloning that can as well exist used to turn your quondam laptop hard drive into a portable storage device.

The company also threw in what looks like a USB thumb drive, but information technology'southward not a storage device at all. Surprisingly, the "device" simply launches your default browser and sends it to the WD download site for the latest commuter and cloning software.