Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive Review

WD Black2 Dual Drive Overview
As we take a closer look at the drive we can see that Western Digital has continued their high quality design to the drive itself. The top of the drive has a pretty sleek reflective black finish on it with the WD Black2 logo appearing in gold. What’s really cool is there is an outline of a PCB etched on the end, which adds to the cool factor. I could easily see this drive being displayed in a case with a side panel window.

Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive

The drive itself look much like your typical 2.5-inch solid state drive, although it is a bit thicker. Normally most 2.5-inch solid state drives are 7mm thick, but this drive is a bit thicker at 9.5mm. This means that it might not fit in your Ultrabook, but it will fit in a normal laptop or of small form factor build. There are two mounting points on each side of the drive.

Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive

If we take a look at the back of the drive we can see this is not your ordinary solid state drive, we actually have a mechanical drive here as well. So there are two drives basically crammed together here. The mechanical drive is actually a WD Blue 1TB 5400 RPM drive. The SSD portion of the drive is made up of two 64 GB 20 nm MLC NAND modules, JMicron JMF667H 4-channel controller and 1GB NANYA DRAM chip. There is also a smaller PCB portion that houses the Marvell bridge chip to make everything work properly.

Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive

So with two drives you would have two separate connections right? Wrong the Marvell bridge chip makes everything work in perfect harmony as a single drive so you only have a single SATA data and power connection.

Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive

The JMicron JMF667H controller supports SATA 6GB/s and has a read throughput of 350MB/s and a write speed of 140MB/s. This is much slower than current solid state drives, but still faster than any mechanical hard drive out there. The mechanical hard drive also supports SATA 6GB/s and has a max transfer speed of 140 MB/s with a latency of 5.5 ms.

Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive

Let’s get this drive installed and get to testing!

About Author