The WD Black2 Review: World's First 2.5" Dual-Drive
by Kristian Vättö on January 30, 2014 7:00 AM ESTPower Consumption
The idle power consumption comes out fairly high. Given that there are more components than in a regular SSD, I was expecting higher power draw but 1.32W is more than I would've thought. Note that this is SSD only -- the hard drive isn't even spinning, although its controller still draws some power. Since notebooks are the target market of the Black2, I would have liked to see some sort of low-power state support (HIPM+DIPM and DevSleep) or at least lower idle power consumption in general.
Load power consumption isn't nearly as bad. If the SSD and HDD are accessed simultaneously, the power draw is obviously higher than that of a single drive but not critically. If you ran a normal dual-drive setup, the power draw could easily be more than 4.5W anyway.
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Gigaplex - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Once the partitions are set, do they show up in a different Windows box that doesn't have the drivers installed? If so, they're not really drivers, they're just a one-off utility to create the partitions.arturoh - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
It does sound like the WD "driver" just sets up the partition table in MBR to point to the correct places. It'd be nice if WD provides a Linux utility or, even better, gives steps using existing Linux tools to correctly setup the MBR.arturoh - Friday, January 31, 2014 - link
I'd like know if WD plans to provide a utility to set it up under Linux.Guspaz - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
SATA expanders demonstrate that most chipsets do support multiple devices per SATA port.oranos - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
SSD is pretty much standard. HDD is too much of a bottleneck in performance system now.kepstin - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
I'm rather curious whether this dual drive would show up correctly, with space from both disks available, in Linux.Not that I would pick it up, I've already gone the dual drive route with a SanDisk extreme II and a hard drive in the (former) optical bay.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
It does.Panzerknacker - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Like I said above, it should, and it's the reason I think it should not require a driver. Would be nice if this can be tested. If someone is gonna test this, please use a OLDER linux distro to make sure that there is no specific driver included.calyth - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
If they required a driver for windows so that the 2 drives shows up on the same partition table, I wouldn't count on Linux support yet.Unless WD sends a bunch to some linux hw devs ;)
Maltz - Thursday, January 30, 2014 - link
Except that it works fine on a Mac without drivers... once it's partitioned in Windows. I suspect the driver is only important or needed in the partitioning process.