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The WD Black2 is a hybrid hard drive designed for mobile users, enabling a host system to operate a 1 TB Hdd and a 120 GB SSD via a single SATA interface. WD Labs hasn't simply improved its hybrid drive line; it's ingeniously combined two drives into a single enclosure. This architecture is both innovative and impressive. Each drive is managed by a controller that acts as a traffic manager, distributing I/O commands from a single SATA interface to each drive. This drive is available in a single 1 TB/120 GB capacity configuration in a 2.5-inch, 9.5 mm thick form factor.
A teardown reveals that WD is using a 1 TB mechanical hard drive (WD Blue Slim) spinning at 5400 RPM, which takes up most of the physical space. Above the mechanical hard drive, connected via a controller chip, is a 120 GB solid-state drive (SSD) with a JMicron controller. This is clearly WD's first foray into the SSD market since the failure of the SiliconEdge SSD in early 2010. WD publishes the following SSD performance figures: 350 MB/s read speed and 140 MB/s write speed via a SATA 6 Gb/s interface. Compared to modern discrete SSDs, these figures are significantly below industry standards, but this is mainly due to the limitations of the discrete interface in the WD Black2 architecture. WD has not published performance figures for the mechanical hard drive, but they should be in line with the Blue Slim mechanical hard drive.
A precise understanding of the Black2's specific features is crucial to understanding WD's target market positioning. This hard drive is clearly designed for the mobile market, specifically full-size laptops with 9.5mm-thick drive bays. However, its target market is actually much smaller; it is limited to laptops equipped with 9.5mm-thick drive bays but lacking other expansion options (such as a second drive bay, an mSATA slot, or a removable optical drive bay). WD hopes that many users will appreciate the simplicity of this single-drive solution, but given its primary focus on enthusiasts, the success of the Black2 will depend on market acceptance of this design. In addition to hardware distribution issues, WD only supports Windows. This completely excludes Mac users, which will undoubtedly lead to a significant loss of the enthusiast user base WD hopes to attract.
The Black2 package includes a hard drive, a SATA cable for connecting external devices, and a Usb Flash drive with the necessary drivers accessible via a web browser (standalone drivers are not included). The Black2 (1 TB/120 GB) has a suggested retail price of $299 and comes with a five-year warranty.
The WD Black2 is a hybrid SSD/HDD drive consisting of a 1 TB hard drive and a 120 GB SSD. The WD Black2's HDD section is identical to the Blue Slim (a white label with the product name is visible after disassembling the drive), with the exception of the addition of a SATA adapter to connect the two drives. Another difference from the Blue Slim is that the Black2 is 9.5 mm thicker, and the SSD is located on top.
The front of the hard drive features standard SATA power and data interfaces, ensuring broad hardware compatibility. Regarding software, the Black2 is currently only compatible with the Windows platform. A unique feature of the WD Black2 is that the top cover integrates both the product label and the SSD's printed circuit board.
The WD Black2 has the same PCB design as the Blue Slim, except it adds a Marvell SATA bridge chip that allows a single SATA interface to communicate with both an SSD and an HDD through the same partition mapping.
After carefully removing the top layer of the WD Black2, we can see the NAND flash chips and controller board of this SSD. In this design, WD used a JMicron controller, two 64GB MLC NAND flash chips, and a Nanya DRAM chip.
Before using the WD Black2, users must complete several setup steps. WD includes a USB drive in the box, which, once inserted, will redirect users to the WD website to download the necessary drivers. Please note that the drivers are not yet ready in the initial kits, so an internet connection is currently required for initial hard drive setup; however, drivers should be included in later versions. Initially, only the SSD portion of the hard drive will be displayed. After installing the drivers, users will see two hard drives in their Windows system. WD recommends performing a clean installation of the operating system on the SSD portion, but also provides cloning software to simplify migration if the original operating system occupies less than 120 GB of SSD space.
When testing this hard drive, we first ran comparative tests in specially designed scenarios using only an HDD and only an SSD.
All consumer hard drive performance tests were conducted using the StorageReview platform for mid-range devices. The following products were used for comparison in the following reviews:
We measured sequential read and write speeds of 2 MB using a consumer test platform. The WD Black2 achieved read speeds of 106 MB/s and write speeds of 107 MB/s, which are in the lower midrange and slightly slower than the single-drive Blue Slim 1 TB version. This is likely due to the additional performance overhead caused by the additional controller, but in this case, the impact is minimal.
In the 2MB random transfer test, the WD Black2 achieved a read speed of 46MB/s and a write speed of 47MB/s, which is average and slightly slower than the WD Blue Slim.
In the 4K MB/s random transfer test, the WD Black2 achieved a read speed of 0.218 MB/s and a write speed of 0.616 MB/s, which translates to 55.83 IOPS and 157.66 IOPS, respectively.
In our 4K write latency tests, the WD Black2 demonstrated an average 4K write latency of 6.34 milliseconds, slightly lower than the WD Scorpio Blue. The maximum 4K write latency was 17.87 milliseconds, slightly lower than the Blue Slim.
In our final set of comprehensive tests, we compared the hard drive's performance under various mixed server workloads with queue depths ranging from 1 to 128. Each of our server profile tests was heavily read-oriented, ranging from 67% read in the database profiles to 100% read in the web server profiles. The WD Blue Slim consistently took the lead in all mixed workload tests.
The first test was our database configuration file, where read operations accounted for 67% and write operations accounted for 33%, mostly with transferred data sizes of 8 KB.
The next configuration file is a file server file where 80% of the workload is read and 20% is write, and the transferred data sizes range from 512 bytes to 64 KB.
For the average consumer, it's difficult to directly translate 4K random write speed test results to everyday use. While comparing hard drive performance under various conditions can be useful, it doesn't directly translate to improved performance in everyday tasks or reduced game load times. Therefore, we used data from StorageMark 2010 benchmarks, including HTPC, productivity, and gaming tests, to help readers understand hard drive performance in real-world usage.
This practical test covers disk activity in a gaming environment. The test primarily focuses on hard drive read performance. To simplify the read/write percentages, the HTPC test showed a 64% write speed and a 36% read speed; the productivity test showed a 59% write speed and a 41% read speed; and the gaming test showed a 6% write speed and a 94% read speed. The test system was a 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate operating system with Steam preinstalled, and Grand Theft Auto IV, Left 4 Dead 2, and Mass Effect 2 were loaded and installed. The test recorded a significant amount of read operations for each game from launch to boot, as well as texture loading during gameplay. In this test, we recorded 426 MB of write data and 7,235 MB of read data.
In StorageMark 2010 gaming tests, the WD Black2 trailed the Blue Slim, with an average throughput of 26.79 MB/s or 498 IOPS and an average response time of 16.05 ms.
All consumer SSD tests were conducted using the StorageReview platform, which tests mid-range consumer devices. The following products were used for comparison in the following reviews:
In our initial sequential 2MB transfer performance test, we measured a read speed of 449 MB/s (Western Digital's official read speed is 350 MB/s), while the write speed was only 138 MB/s. While read performance is quite competitive, write performance is less than half that of mainstream SSDs.
When testing random 2MB data transfer speeds, we measured read throughput of 464 MB/s and write throughput of 137 MB/s. Read speeds remain quite competitive, while write performance is significantly inferior to other similar SSDs.
Moving on to the more compact 4K random data transfer test, the WD Black2 stood out with the highest QD1 4K read speed, reaching 52 MB/s or 13,320 IOPS. However, its write performance lagged slightly behind other products in the same group, reaching 68 MB/s or 17,489 IOPS.
In the next test, we switched to a smaller 4K random workload with 100% read activity and increased the queue depth (QD) from 1 to 64. With these settings, the WD Black2's IOPS increased from 11,438 at QD 1 to 59,189 at QD 64. This puts its performance at a relatively low level, comparable to SandForce-based SSDs working with incompressible data.
When switching from read to write mode, the WD Black2 lags behind other mainstream SSDs: its random write throughput increases from 19,452 IOPS at QD1 to 31,358 IOPS at QD64. This is significantly lower than other mainstream SSDs, whose peak performance exceeds 90,000 IOPS.
Compared to the average write latency of popular consumer SSDs, the WD Black2 ranks last with a write time of 0.0567 milliseconds and a peak latency of just 1.61 milliseconds.
In the final series of comprehensive tests, the hard drive's performance was compared under various mixed server workloads with queue depths ranging from 1 to 128. Each of our server profile tests was heavily read-oriented, ranging from 67% reads in the database profiles to 100% reads in the web server profiles. In all mixed workload tests, the WD Black2 SSD performed close to or average in performance.
To start, here's a quick overview of our database: reads account for 67% and writes account for 33%, mostly with 8KB data transfer sizes.
The next configuration file is a file server file where 80% of the workload is read and 20% is write, and the transferred data sizes range from 512 bytes to 64 KB.
The latest configuration file is designed for workstation operation using 8KB data transfer rates, with write speeds of 20% and read speeds of 80%.
The first practical test scenario was our HTPC (home theater PC). The test included: playing a 720p HD movie in Media Player Classic, playing a 480p SD movie in VLC, downloading three movies simultaneously via iTunes, and recording a 15-minute 1080i HD TV stream using Windows Media Center. We aimed for higher IOPS and MB/s performance, as well as lower latency. In this test, we wrote 2986 MB of data to the hard drive and read 1924 MB of data.
In our HTPC tests, the WD Black2 achieved average read/write speeds of 147 MB/s, or 3,170 IOPS, which is significantly lower than other popular SSDs.
The second practical test focused on the drive's performance in an office environment. The goal of this test was to demonstrate the hard drive's performance under everyday use by most users. The test included three hours of work in an office environment using the 32-bit Vista operating system, launching Outlook 2007 and connecting to an Exchange server, browsing the web using Chrome and IE8 browsers, editing documents in Office 2007, viewing PDF files in Adobe Reader, and playing local music for one hour and online music via Pandora for two hours. During this test, we recorded 4830 MB of data written to the hard drive and 2758 MB of data read.
In our performance tests, the WD Black2 averaged 145 MB/s, or 4954 IOPS, which was slightly slower than other products but not the lowest; the Crucial M500 480GB SSD performed the worst.
The third practical test focused on disk activity in a gaming environment. Unlike the HTPC or productivity tests, this test primarily focuses on hard drive read performance. To simplify the read/write percentages, the HTPC test had a write speed of 64% and a read speed of 36%; the productivity test had a write speed of 59% and a read speed of 41%; and the gaming test had a write speed of 6% and a read speed of 94%. The test system was a 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate operating system with Steam pre-installed, and Grand Theft Auto IV, Left 4 Dead 2, and Mass Effect 2 were loaded and installed. The test recorded a significant amount of read operations for each game from launch to boot, as well as texture loading during gameplay. In this test, we recorded 426 MB of write data and 7,235 MB of read data.
In our tests, which focused primarily on gaming reads, the WD Black2 averaged just 277 MB/s, or 5,218 IOPS, placing it last among other mainstream SSDs.
After testing each hard drive individually, we attempted to access two drives simultaneously to evaluate the Marvell controller's performance under heavy load. When both drives were simultaneously performing read and write operations, response was fast; however, performance degraded when accessing both drives simultaneously, even when one drive's read/write speed exceeded 500 MB/s. This means that if the SSD read speed was 450 MB/s and the HDD's 110 MB/s, overall performance would never exceed the limits of the SATA 6 Gb/s interface. However, in the initial tests, the test would hang when the two drives were subjected to opposing loads, indicating that the controller may be unable to handle multiple conflicting read/write operations in certain situations. A system reboot and driver reinstallation (re-creating partition mappings) resolved the issue, but it's worth noting that the hard drives' performance did not meet expectations in our test scenario. WD states that future firmware releases will continue to improve product stability and performance, so multi-drive performance may improve over time.
Power consumption is a critical factor for any laptop hard drive. The main sources of power consumption are either the bright screen or the storage device itself. In the following tests, we'll record average power consumption while running a series of complex performance benchmarks.
Comparing the power consumption of the WD Black2 hard drive with that of the Blue Slim hard drive on which it is based (plus an SSD), we found that the Black2 consumes more power than a standalone hard drive across all parameters. This isn't entirely unexpected, given the dual-drive design, but it highlights a problem with this type of drive: even if only one part of the drive is active, the other remains idle and continues to consume power. This means that in most cases, the Black2 will always consume more power than a standalone SSD or HDD.
The WD Black2 is an innovative combo drive that provides the host system with a 1 TB hard drive and a 120 GB SSD. Its 2.5-inch, 9.5 mm thick form factor fits standard laptop hard drive bays and connects via a SATA interface. A third controller manages I/O operations for each drive, depending on the partition being used. The Black2 is currently only available in one 1 TB/120 GB configuration with a suggested retail price of $299.
In terms of performance, the Black2's hard drive section is virtually identical to its prototype, the Blue Slim. We tested its 1TB capacity, achieving sequential read speeds of 106 MB/s and sequential write speeds of 107 MB/s, which is quite good for a large laptop storage capacity. We noticed a slight performance drop compared to the standalone WD Blue Slim, but this is expected given the use of a custom SATA bridge. In terms of solid-state drive (SSD) performance, the Black2 lags behind other mainstream SSDs in most tests. While its read speed reaches 449 MB/s, exceeding WD's claimed 350 MB/s, its write speed is only 138 MB/s. These figures are impressive compared to existing hybrid drives on the market, but pale in comparison to mainstream dedicated SSDs.
The Black2 is undoubtedly a great drive, but that alone isn't enough to justify a purchase. We've already mentioned some of the market adoption issues WD faces, including the lack of Mac support and the fact that many laptops offer the option of installing a second flash drive. Indeed, the Black2 also faces adoption issues, as neither drive is particularly fast, and in some cases, users may notice a decrease in system performance when using both drives simultaneously. Another major issue is the Black2's price, even though we acknowledge that users may not be able to install both a dedicated hard drive and an SSD in their systems. The Black2's suggested retail price is $299, which is comparable to 500GB SSDs like the Crucial m500 and Samsung EVO. While users who opt for an SSD will obviously lose some capacity, they will benefit from a significant improvement in speed, system performance, and battery life. Given the proliferation of cloud storage solutions and the availability and sophisticated design of portable external hard drives with capacities up to 2 TB, it's difficult to justify the use of mezzanine drives at this point. However, the concept has potential, and it's encouraging that Western Digital (WD) continues to innovate, even if the current version isn't perfect.
The innovative design of the WD Black2 deserves praise. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few specific use cases, this configuration is unsuitable for most other tasks. The high suggested retail price and lack of Mac support further limit its market potential.
At StorageReview, I'm responsible for product evaluations and collaborate with industry leaders to develop new testing environments. At home, I spend time with my family.
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