Greetings fellow netizens! First and foremost, I would like to say my greatest thanks to Western Digital and Hardware Zone PH for giving me this opportunity to review this wonderful product of theirs and to my fellow reviewers a big congratulations to you all! Let me introduce myself before we go to the initial review. My name's Lorenzo James de Guzman AKA Mudkip101. I currently reside here in Bulacan. Graduate of Information Technology, a microsoft certified professional and an oracle certified associate. Currently working as a Database Administrator. As you may know, we DBAs maintain the huge storage of data of a company. I have some amount of experiences handling with these drives and the types of storage,backups and restores they could accomplish. But enough about that, let's talk about the WD Black², the world's first 2.5" SSD+HDD dual drive.
At first glimpse, the packaging was well made, eye-catching,detailed and yet still simple but elegant. The package has an image of a formula one racecar in it, as you slide the content of the box, you'll see the full image of the car racing at a blazing speed leaving a golden trail.
Thumbs up to WD for the creativity!. I think the image is referring to WD Black²'s speed and Shift_Technology. I quote from WD Black2's website "WD Black² Shift_Technology is race-ready from the starting line with enhanced firmware and improved algorithms for faster performance and data management". SSD performance degrades when a finite number of writes have been reached or if the drive is almost/reached 100% capacity. WD now has a solution to these problems with their all new WD Black² Dual Drive.
You can move the larger files or write extensive files to the 1TB HDD while leaving only the system files and/or other softwares you want to be optimized in the SSD, increasing the lifetime and maintaining the optimum performance of the SSD.
The WD Black² Dual Drive package contents comes with the following.
- WD Black² Dual Drive Unit
- Quick Install Guide
- Tech Support and Warranty Guide
- SATA to USB Adapter Cable
- USB Key (Matching the F1 inspired theme)
The adapter utilizes a USB 3.0 connection for data transfer, and a USB 2.0 connection to power the WD Black² during the cloning process. The unique USB "Key" takes us to the website of the WD Black² (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1190) in which we can download the drive installation software as well as some really helpful tutorials on how to install the SSHD and how to clone an existing HDD to the WD Black². The key symbolizes the start of our engine that will leave our old mechanical harddrives to the dust. Once you go SSD, you can never go back. The WD Black² looks well built (Not to mention the 5 year warranty that comes with it), has a great design with a good color combination of black and gold and pretty compact as it is a 9.5mm model which should fit all SFF systems and the vast majority of laptops, though some slim laptops use 7mm drives.
Small note: Be sure to check out your laptop's drive measurements before buying this $300 Dual Drive.
My personal expectations to it is that it will be a bit slower than the traditional SSDs we have today but still faster than the HDDs. This is an ideal drive for laptops which only has a single drive bay. Let's hope for the best for WD Black² :)