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Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive

Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive Review – Solid state drives, or SSDs are very nice to have, especially if you have the intention to build a system that starts up and performs very well in the blink of an eye. More often than not however, SSDs come with severe storage limitations, and some of the ones that do come with a sizeable storage size are way too expensive.

The Western Digital Black2 is an elegant solution to an age old storage problem

Western Digital has just the component for you, if you need the best of both worlds in one simple solution, in the form of the Black2 hybrid drive. The Black2 comes in a fancy box that includes accessories and a manual. The drive itself looks like a typical 2.5-inch hard drive meant for notebooks, and doesn’t at all shows the true nature of the device, which is actually a 120GB SSD that also houses a 1TB partition. Setting up the Black2 takes a bit of work.

You first need to initialise the drive and make it active via Storage Manager if you’re using Windows or Disk Utility if you’re on a Mac. You will then have a choice to either install a fresh copy of Windows to it or you could use the accompanying Acronis software to do a cloning procedure, which is further helped by a SATA-to-USB dongle that comes with the Black2. After the installation is done, and the drive is properly hooked up to your PC or notebook, you will also need to install and run another companion software which is available on the WD website to unlock the Black2’s 1TB storage partition.

This software can also be downloaded via the USB stick included in the box. The steps mentioned above sound very tedious, but it isn’t a very complicated process as it is time consuming. If you’re going the cloning route, we would suggest hooking up the SATA-to-USB adapter to USB 3.0 ports, which will significantly boost the data transfer speed. Performance-wise, the Black2 SSD is as speedy as can be expected. Operating system boot up time is in and around four to five seconds, and software boots up quickly as well, which is great regardless if you’re running a desktop or notebook system, as the Black2 fits both form factors equally well. Notebook users will especially like owning the Black2 as not many drives offer both an SSD and HDD storage in one compact solution. The Western Digital Black2 hybrid drive is the drive that many computer enthusiasts have been waiting for, especially those who are building a lean system and don’t want to compromise on performance.