The WD Black series of hard drives along with the Velociraptor have been WD’s long-standing top-performance products. With their primary competition clearly coming from the SSD space with Samsung, Intel, etc. proving they hold the storage performance crown, WD needs to show they are still a dominant force in the storage space. Enter the WD Black²: the culmination of WD’s engineering prowess in mechanical disk design and the company’s attempt at re-entering the SSD market.
The WD Black² is exactly what the name implies; two drives sandwiched together to create a single storage device which comes in at an impressive 9.5mm thickness at the standard 2.5″ form factor. The concept is quite simple really but what it took to pull it off is an engineering marvel. The WD Black² is actually a 1TB WD Blue UltraSlim packed together on the same controller as a JMicron-controlled 120GB SSD. Not many of you may remember but WD had SSDs way back in 2010 with their SiliconEdge product line. A single controller chip handles IO traffic for both the SSD and HDD.
Related: How To Choose the Best WD Hard Drive
- Model Number: WD1001X06XDTL
- Interface: SATA 6 Gb/s
- Form factor: 2.5-inch
- Performance (SSD): 350MB/s read, 140MB/s write
- Warranty: 5 Years
- Average power requirements (W)
- Read/Write: 1.8
- Idle: 0.9
- Standby/Sleep: 0.9
- Temperature (°C) Operating: 0 to 60
- Non-operating:Â -40 to 70
- Shock (Gs)
- Operating (2 ms, write): 30
- Operating (2 ms, read): 65
- Non-operating (2 ms): 350
- Acoustics (dBA)
- Idle: 20
- Seek (average): 21
- Physical Dimensions:Â 9.5mm x 100.20 x 69.85
- Weight (lb./kg, ± 10%): 0.28/0.125
Closer Look
Installation
After hooking the drive to your system, you will need to install the WD Black² software to enable the entire drive. You can use the included USB key to get you started. It will open up the run command and direct your browser to the WD official website where you can download the installation software and data migration tool.
After download, run the installation file and after it runs you will have the remaining HDD partition of your WD Black².
WD has an installation guide in the official product page here: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1190
Performance Testing
Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i7 3770K
Motherboard: MSI Z77 Mpower
Memory: Kingston HyperX T1 DDR3-2400
Storage:WD Black²
PSU: Seasonic X-760W
SSD TESTING
ATTO Disk Benchmark benchmarks a drive’s read and write speeds with increasing file sizes and graphs them.
Crystal Disk Mark is storage benchmarking software was developed by “hiyohiyo†of Japan, and is available for free. Crystal Disk Mark measures sequential, and random read/write speeds of storage devices.
We’ve taken our compression test files, a collection of images, documents and other files ranging from 1KB to 50MB amounting to 3,310 files for 3.34GB. For large file transfer, we take a single large movie file and transfer it to the test drive. All files we’re copied of a RAID0 SSD partition.
HDD TESTING
ATTO Disk Benchmark benchmarks a drive’s read and write speeds with increasing file sizes and graphs them.
Crystal Disk Mark is storage benchmarking software was developed by “hiyohiyo†of Japan, and is available for free. Crystal Disk Mark measures sequential, and random read/write speeds of storage devices.
We’ve taken our compression test files, a collection of images, documents and other files ranging from 1KB to 50MB amounting to 3,310 files for 3.34GB. For large file transfer, we take a single large movie file and transfer it to the test drive. All files we’re copied of a RAID0 SSD partition.
Further Testing
As opposed to what WD is recommending, we went ahead and repartitioned the SSD as a single partition.
The numbers above reflect figures that of the SSD so we figured we try and see what the drive performs like after filling around 120GB of data and this is what we got:
The WD Black² chokes on the 111GB which is around the size of the normal SSD partition. After this we tested the performance of the drive again in ATTO:
We go back to the HDD performance figures.
CONCLUSION
The performance benchmarks paint a sad picture for the WD Black². The HDD performance results are nowhere near what a modern WD Black would deliver and the SSD figures are way below industry standard. Its easy to become a performance snob when you review high-end devices frequently even moreso in the case of the WD Black² as it practically implies the next-level of WD Black performance.
Truth be told, the value of the WD Black² is more in its engineering rather than outright performance but the WD Black²’s biggest fault lies in the fact that WD has made a grave mistake of labeling the drive as a, well, a Black series product. Being in the WD Black series, people expect highly of the performance figures and packing in an SSD there will also be under tight scrutiny because of the nomenclature involved in the product title. To put it simply, WD should’ve called the WD Black² as the WD UltraSlim².
Going back, the WD Black² is a good product but is weighed down by its extortionate asking price. Should the WD Black² actually shown performance worthy of the WD Black family, the price would’ve been normal and justified for the line but that is not the case here. WD has banked on the naming to create hype for a product which clearly is marketed to small segment of power users. That’s right, a small segment: people who need  an SSD for faster application and games loading and/or large-capacity disk but are limited to only using a single device. If that sounds quite off from happening in real-life, note that some laptops have this limitation but if compromises are to be made, a 1TB disk will always trump a 120GB SSD on a laptop. Modern performance notebooks though have mSATA or m2 slot to accommodate an SSD though.
In closing, the WD Black² is a victim of poor corporate and marketing decisions. It is a good product but cost of production as well as a luxury tax for the Black naming bump the asking price to a level where it is just too much to even consider as an option. A 1TB WD Black and a higher-performing 120GB SSD will cost far less. The WD Black² is a great demonstration of WD’s great engineering skills but there is simply no way this is a feasible purchase for anyone. The applications are just far too limited and whenever it might be appropriate, the cost is a major turn-off.
The WD Black² comes backed with a 5-year warranty.
6 Comments
sabi ko na nga ba eh :))
Paki-sabi kay Boss Mac, maraming salamat sa write-up. Saka na kami magtutuos! Haha 😀
wah!
Didn’t I tell you it wasn’t a good product 😛 😀
Its good enough as a paper weight or a shim for me haha
lol