Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive Review

Final Thoughts
So what can we say about the Western Digital Black2 Dual Hard drive? First you have to understand what Western Digital’s goal was. They wanted to give you the ability to fit two drives in a single drive bay and give you a performance boost over a traditional mechanical hard drive. Does the WD Black2 accomplish this? Yes. Is it the fastest drive out there? No.

Starting with the solid state drive portion of the WD Black2, we saw sequential read and write speeds of around 410 MB/s and 140 MB/s respectively. I’m sure as many of you are going to point out immediately this is by far not as fast as many current solid state drives that are on the market right now. But the write speed at least is far superior to any mechanical drive and you will instantly notice this if you plan to use the 120 GB SSD portion of the drive as your boot drive. You will see much faster boot times and programs will load much faster as well. The write speed was a little disappointing.

Moving on to the hard drive section of the drive it performed just as any 2.5-inch mechanical hard drive should and we can’t be disappointed at that. On top of that you are getting 1 TB of storage space too.

Looking at the price of the WD Black2 it currently sits at $289.99 at my favorite online retailer. I’m sure many consumers would argue that that can pickup at 120 GB solid state drive and a 1TB hard drive for less and then have some money left over. This is true, but this product really is not made for those type of people. If you have more than one storage slot in your laptop or more than one 2.5-inch drive bay in your PC this product really is not for you. If you happen to only have a single slot available and want speed and lots of storage space this is a great option. Keep in mind Western Digital also throws in the SATA to USB 3.0 adapter for the drive and Acronis TrueImage software.

I would hope in the future that Western Digital outfits newer version of this drive with a better SSD controller than the JMicron JMF667H so we can see speeds that can compete with current solid state drives that are on the market. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive an 8 out of 10 score.

rating8 10 small

Pros:
– 2 drives in one!
– Outperforms specifications
– Sleek design
– SATA to USB 3.0 adapter & Acronis TrueImage software included

Cons:
– SSD performance is below what is currently available
– Drive unlock software not included (needs to be downloaded)
– Price is a little high given the performance

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