WD Black2 Dual Drive Review

The Black2 is a remarkable upgrade option if you’re looking for speed and disk space without taking too much of a beating on the wallet.

The packaging is so cool, it’s something you could actually put in a display case.

This is the package (minus a cable that somehow didn’t come along the review unit).

The square rectangle on top is the drive. The ignition key is actually a USB Drive that contains software to help one with data migration from one drive to another.

Last but not least, the drive itself.

Note – it’s DUAL DRIVE. It’s not a hybrid drive like Seagate’s Momentus range where it’s a single drive using 2 technology. The WD Black2 Dual drive is literally an SSD (120GB) and HDD (1TB) in a single 2.5″ package.

More details at the official product page.

Benchmarks

Here’s what the results look like for the SSD.

And the one for HDD.

As you can see from the graph, the SSD portion writes about 25% faster than the HDD, and reads almost 4 times faster than the HDD.

The Verdict

The WD Black2 Dual Drive costs almost RM 1,200 which is a hefty price to pay for storage and speed.

Sure, you might be thinking a 1TB drive is ….. and a 120GB SSD is ….. yes correct but the WD Black2 Dual Drive allows you to have both of them in a single drive. It’s still cheaper (though probably not as fast) as other 1TB SSD and it sure is faster for on the operating system drive compared to HDD.

Just keep in mind that this solution is meant for notebooks where drive bays are limited. There’s no reason to look at this option if you’re on a desktop PC.