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For the hell of it!
When I first saw this product, one of the first questions that sprang to my mind, is performance of the SSD portion hindered by access to the HDD portion of this drive over the shared single SATA connection? Without any clear way of how to test or isolate any performance impact. I decided to do some simple file copy testing, first to the SSD portion with no HDD portion access and again to the SSD portion with another file copy occurring simultaneously on the HDD portion. The results were not entirely negative or positive, but did give some indication that SSD performance is impacted by simultaneous HDD access.
File Copy Test, write to the SSD portion of the WD Black² Dual Drive:
- Without HDD portion activity:
- 28GB write completed in 3 minutes and 10 seconds for an average write performance of 146MB/sec.
- With HDD portion activity:
- 28GB write completed in 3 minutes and 44 seconds for an average write performance of 124MB/sec
With this rudimentary testing, it appears that the SSD portion sustains roughly a 15% performance hit, if there is simultaneous HDD portion activity occurring.
To further my curiosity, I re-ran CrystalDiskMark on the SSD portion, while the HDD portion had a large write occurring. Here is the previously mentioned SSD portion performance without HDD activity next to the same test with activity occurring on the HDD portion. Again, this testing is hard to isolate accurately, but there is no denying the impact in performance of the SSD portion if there is activity occurring on the HDD portion.
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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.