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Benchmarks:
With the informational portion of the review concluded, it is time to dive into the benchmarks to see if this WD Black² Dual Drive delivers on the printed performance specifications.
ATTO Disk Benchmark:
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With ATTO, the SSD portion of the WD Black² Dual Drive topped out around 417MB/sec on reads and 147MB/sec on writes, where as the HDD portion came in at 116MB/sec on reads and 113MB/sec on writes. The SSD portion performed higher than the printed 350MB/sec read max, which was great to see, and the writes were right on the money of claimed performance. Having no printed specs on the HDD portion, the performance is very similar to the WD Scorpio Blue 7mm ultrabook drive we reviewed awhile back.
CrystalDiskMark:
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With CrystalDiskMark, both portions of the drive performed near identical of the ATTO results, meaning the SSD portion continues to deliver higher than printed read performance.
HDTune:
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As mentioned previously in the review, HDtune had some challenges handling this dual drive. I was only able to accurately perform read and write tests on the SSD portion, as once the WD Black² Dual Drive software was installed, HDTune saw a single drive (accessing the SSD and HDD portions as a single contiguous space). As for the performance, the read and write performance was more or less as advertised in the technical specifications.
PCMark 7:
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PCmark 7 is a synthetic benchmark that attempts to replicate real world usage within Windows 7. As such, the performance numbers here may be more indicative as to what to expect in daily use, over the earlier tests that measure performance in a very controlled manner.
I would like to see the mechanical drive having 16GB of flash memory itself, so it’ll be a hybrid drive, along with the 120GB SSD. Maybe a 256GB SSD option too.
My only concern with the device is that the controller is kind of unstable if you try to intensively access the mechanical and SSD drive simultaneously, storagereview found. WD will probably revise the firmware.
Otherwise I think it’s a great product and I’m letting my friends know about it.