The WD Black2 Review: World's First 2.5" Dual-Drive
by Kristian Vättö on January 30, 2014 7:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench 2011
Two years ago we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on peak IO performance and basic garbage collection routines. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. Our thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives.
We tried to cover as many bases as possible with the software incorporated into this test. There's a lot of photo editing in Photoshop, HTML editing in Dreamweaver, web browsing, game playing/level loading (Starcraft II & WoW are both a part of the test) as well as general use stuff (application installing, virus scanning). We've included a large amount of email downloading, document creation and editing as well. To top it all off we even use Visual Studio 2008 to build Chromium during the test.
The test has 2,168,893 read operations and 1,783,447 write operations. The IO breakdown is as follows:
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload IO Breakdown | ||||
| IO Size | % of Total | |||
| 4KB | 28% | |||
| 16KB | 10% | |||
| 32KB | 10% | |||
| 64KB | 4% | |||
Only 42% of all operations are sequential, the rest range from pseudo to fully random (with most falling in the pseudo-random category). Average queue depth is 4.625 IOs, with 59% of operations taking place in an IO queue of 1. The full description of the test can be found here.
AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload
AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload
Our light workload actually has more write operations than read operations. The split is as follows: 372,630 reads and 459,709 writes. The relatively close read/write ratio does better mimic a typical light workload (although even lighter workloads would be far more read centric). There's lots of web browsing, photo editing (but with a greater focus on photo consumption), video playback as well as some application installs and gaming.
The I/O breakdown is similar to the heavy workload at small IOs, however you'll notice that there are far fewer large IO transfers.
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload IO Breakdown | ||||
| IO Size | % of Total | |||
| 4KB | 27% | |||
| 16KB | 8% | |||
| 32KB | 6% | |||
| 64KB | 5% | |||
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
100 Comments
View All Comments
MrSpadge - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Yeah, with the current product choices and price point they're effectively betting "People, please don't buy this!" and will probably wonder about low sales at some point. Seagate introduced a 2 TB 2.5" drive with standard 9.5 mm height a few months ago - that's pretty impressive, but might not have enough space left for an mSATA SSD due to it using 3 platters.ImSpartacus - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
For $300, you could easily get a ~500GB SSD.I feel like the black2 @ $300 is only useful for people that absolutely need that extra 620GB of storage in a single 2.5" drive.
hucklongfin - Saturday, February 1, 2014 - link
I guess I'm old (and I am), but I remember paying $700 for a 70mb drive (Micropolis?) back in the late 80's and not asking too many questions because I assumed it "fell" off the back of a truck.. I put it in my ALR 386 with a 1006 1:1 controller. It was the bomb back in the day. I have a long memory so lot of stuff doesn't seem that expensive to me!Frangelina - Saturday, February 1, 2014 - link
That's what I did to my 8470p. An M4 256 and a momentus XT500 I bought a year ago at NE for $79 in a caddy for the DVD slot.Tuvok86 - Thursday, February 6, 2014 - link
This is exactly what I did years ago, upgraded to 128GB ssd and switched the cd drive with the stock 500GB hd.This thing would have been great at that time but nowadays, seriously, you can get a 500GB ssd, even preinstalled, even cheaper. Too little, too late.
philipma1957 - Thursday, February 6, 2014 - link
price is way too high . 290 for 1.12 tb storage a crucial 960gb ssd is 400 on sale a samsung 1tb ssd is 500 on sale. why pay 290 for a clearly inferior product. Now if it was 250 gb plus 1.5tb for 290 it would make some sense.twtech - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link
Even in the case where you need a lot of storage with just one bay, I'd argue that a 1TB SSD would still be a significantly superior option from a performance and power consumption standpoint, and you can buy a Samsung 840 series on Newegg right now for only a couple hundred dollars more. So that even further narrows the target market for this drive.danwat1234 - Wednesday, January 21, 2015 - link
Now it's only $130 on Newegg!!Aseries - Friday, February 20, 2015 - link
The real world price of this device is down to $128 at Amazon.tipoo - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
So being a manually managed dual disk, could someone configure this as a Fusion Drive or similar?