Western Digital’s Black² Dual Drive is exactly the 2.5-inch hard drive to buy if you need the speed of an SSD and the capacity of a regular drive, but you only have space for a single drive in your laptop and you’re on a bit of a budget. That’s because the Dual Drive has both technologies built into a single drive enclosure, and costs significantly less than an SSD with only half the total storage, which can set you back over R5k.
It’s not what you’d call a hybrid drive, either, although in some respects it qualifies. In the hard drive world, “hybrid” drives like those in Seagate’s Momentus XT range use a few gigabytes of solid-state memory to cache often-used files, speeding up commonly-performed tasks while providing plenty of capacity for file storage. The result is a faster-than-normal drive, but it’s still effectively only a single storage device and can’t compete with SSD speeds.
Western Digital’s Dual Drive, on the other hand, places a completely separate 120GB SSD alongside a traditional 1TB hard drive, giving you two drives in a single enclosure. The idea is to let you install your operating system to the SSD and for you to use the regular drive for data storage, resulting in super-fast boot times, incredible application response and near-instant sleep and resumes without any need to compromise on storage space.
Best of all, doing so means you don’t need two separate drive bays, a handy fact that makes the Dual Drive a good option when it comes to upgrading notebooks, most of which only have one. The only pitfall is that the Dual Drive is 9mm thick, and thus won’t fit into any Ultrabooks as those have a maximum drive bay size of 7mm.
The Dual Drive also comes with a five-year warranty for that extra peace of mind that comes from knowing that should it fail at any point before the five years are up, Western Digital will support it.
It’s not without its drawbacks, however, as it’s a little pricy and performs like an entry-level SSD rather than a performance part that you might associate with Western Digital’s Black range. Still, it outperforms any spindle-based drive you care to name, and is thus a good compromise between price, capacity and performance. It’s suitable for anyone looking for more storage than a straight-up SSD offers and more speed than a regular drive provides on a budget of around R3 000.
The Installation
Installing the Dual Drive is quite straightforward. Simply remove your old hard drive from your laptop, insert the Dual Drive into the space it just vacated, screw it in securely and proceed with your operating system installation.
Alternatively, you can use the special WD-specific downloadable copy of Acronis True Image 2013 and the USB to SATA cable that’s included with the Dual Drive to clone your existing operating system hard drive. Just be sure you have less than 120GB of data on your original drive, otherwise you’ll need to manually specify which data to exclude or delete some data before cloning begins. If that’s not feasible, you could always start with a fresh OS install.
Once that’s done and you’re on the Windows desktop, you’ll need to insert the USB stick that comes in the box; that takes you to Western Digital’s website where you can download the drive’s software. Simply download and run it, and all drivers needed for Windows to recognise the 1TB partition are installed. In a few seconds, voila, your 1TB drive is now visible to Windows and ready to use.
Performance
We put the Dual Drive through its paces using the freeware AS SSD benchmark which tests sequential and random read-write performance (a function that essentially determines how fast a drive is) without using the drive’s cache. It also benchmarks copy speeds of both big and small files, something you’ll probably do a lot of with the Dual Drive.
We mashed it into an old laptop running an Ivy Bridge Core i7 chip, cloned its OS drive (Windows 7 Home Premium) and set off on our benchmarks. First off, the boot time just about halved to 22 seconds, down from 42; programs opened a lot faster, and generally getting around the Windows interface felt far snappier than it did before. Resuming and sleeping both took less than two seconds each, too, so immediately the upgrade appeared to pay off.
But just how fast did it handle reads and writes? AS SSD said on the sequential tests it returned 358MB/s (read) and 139MB/s (write). 4K reads and writes came back at 23MB/s and 44MB/s respectively; neither of these are earth-shattering figures for an SSD, but they’re still way higher than anything you’ll get from a regular drive.
We employed AS SSD’s copy test that uses three sets of files – a single large file(an ISO), a collection of small program files and a second collection of even smaller game files – which showed copy speeds of 292MB/s, 130MB/s and 181MB/s respectively on the SSD portion, and 58MB/s, 44MB/s and 54MB/s on the magnetic drive. These results show that the SSD portion is on par with other entry-level SSDs, and about as fast as (if not a little faster than) traditional hard drives.
While these aren’t exactly blazingly fast figures, they show that the Dual Drive is easily fast enough to enhance Windows performance, and that’s what counts.
Summing up
In the end, Western Digital deserves some kudos for the Black² Dual Drive’s conception and design. It solves the problems of having multiple drives in a single system using just a single hard drive bay and the need for speed and capacity all in a rather convenient package.
That it’s not the fastest SSD in the world isn’t much of a concern either, because it still beats out every non-solid-state drive and makes Windows fly along at a tremendous pace, and having an extra terabyte tacked on for non-essential file storage is very useful indeed.
Lastly, its price. While you can certainly buy a separate 120GB SSD and a hard drive bigger than 1TB for less than R3 000, you can’t get them into a laptop with a single enclosure. You’re coughing up to get the speed of an SSD and the capacity of a regular drive into a laptop-friendly form factor, and that’s well worth paying for.
That said, you might also want to weigh up whether your needs could be satisfied with a slightly more capacious SSD; you can pick up a 256GB drive for between R2 000 and R3 000, and if your budget supports it a 512GB drive will set you back around R5 000. If the answer is “no”, the Black² Dual Drive is a very good compromise indeed, offering you both speed and capacity for a pretty good price.
If you’re a desktop user, however, you’re better off steering clear and rather getting two separate drives since you’ll get better performance and bang for your buck that way, but then you have the luxury of space inside your roomy case, which laptops just don’t have.
Manufacturer: Western Digital
Model: Black² Dual Drive
Capacity: 120GB SSD, 1TB Hard Drive
Interface: SATA6
RRP: R2 999
Mac support workaround
It’s possible to get the Dual Drive working with Mac OSX. Once you have the drive set up on your Windows machine and it’s showing both partitions, simply remove it and connect it to a Mac using the included USB to SATA cable and use OS X’s Disk Utility to format both drives to HFS. Voila, instant Dual Drive for Mac.
Extending an SSD’s lifespan
Since SSDs have a limited number of reads and writes before they fail completely due to the fact that the NAND Flash cells in the memory they’re made with have a limited life cycle, you’re actually extending the drive’s life by using the spindle-based portion for data storage as you’ll need fewer reads and writes to the SSD to get through every day.
