The time has come for us to be able to test the performance, quality and speed of the WD Black². In the next couple of paragraphs, I’ll be showing you the true speed and performance the WD Black² which it was able to attain during the user trials. No bias and no edit of any kind. Just the pure and unadulterated truth. I’ll be sharing my experiences with the WD Black², both the negative and the positive sides. I’ll also show you why you should ditch your old mechanical hard drive with an SSD and how big of an upgrade an SSD would give to your personal computer but first let me present to you the pros and cons of an SSD and an HDD.
These are the basic things that you need to know about the HDD and the SSD. The reason why you should leave behind your HDD for an SSD is that the SSD would give a large boost to your system by up to 80-400%! Though it would cost A LOT of green to store all your files and games to the SSD. We recommend having the SSD as a boot drive for your system to fasten things up such as boot up times and system processes and store your big files or write extensive files to the HDD. Luckily for us, the WD Black² has incorporated BOTH of these 2 worlds into one single drive, making it the first 2.5” Dual Drive. It also comes with 5 years warranty from WD but for a hefty sum of Php 13,000 to Php 15,000, pretty expensive ei? Let’s see if the product is worth its price.
Benchmarks
I have managed to get the performance of these 2 wonderful drives (WD Black² and the WD 1TB Caviar Blue) by using the benchmarking softwares thoughtfully provided by Hardware Zone Phillippines. Thanks for that, now let’s get rolling!
PCMark 7 v1.4.0
PCMark 7 is a great tool to benchmark your powerhouse rig. However, in this review, I’ll only be using its System/Secondary Storage Suite to test these devices. It uses simulations of typical file access patterns of real-world programs to give an indication of how each drive will handle real-world applications.
As expected, you’ll see the SSD part of the WD Black² easily topping of the HDD drives. Look at that sexy score in starting applications with a whopping 52.35 MB/s, it DOMINATED the HDDs scores of 2.25 MB/s for the HDD part of the WD Black² and 4.13 MB/s for the WD Caviar Blue at about 10-20x the amount! Coming in second is the 1TB Caviar Blue and lastly the HDD of the WD Black². Not bad for a 5200 rpm HDD.
PCMark 8 v2.0.162.0
This benchmarking tool is similar to what the previous PCMark 7 does, it handles a host of real-world tasks that will be impacted by SSD performance, including importing pictures, editing video, running listening to music, booting applications, and even playing games. This tool is somehow more specific to what it is currently running and thus gives a more precise result.
Same outcome as with the last tool we used. You could clearly see how an SSD could give the upper hand in your day to day task. Easily topping off its HDD counterparts.
AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark
Both of these tools run each drive through a variety of tests. Their sequential read and write routines test the raw file-copying pace of each drive, while a variety of random read and write tests demonstrate how responsive the drive is to the more random use a drive is put through during day to day use – the ‘snappy’ feel of an SSD is all about its random read access performance.
As you can see on the above tables, the results are the same as the last 2 benchmarking tools we used which proves that the WD Black² is worth the investment as an upgrade to laptops and gaming PCs alike. Let’s see how well the WD Black² will do on the gaming portion of the review.