Western Digital Black² Review–Two-In-One High Performance SSD & HDD For PHP 13,950

July 04 11:21 2014 by Alexei Rivera Print This Article

Solid State Drives (SSDs), the market’s answer to nearly instant access to data on a storage chip, has always been the best at what it does – speeding up bootup & load times of our favorite software. That said, SSD capacities have always been much smaller than platter-type Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). Solutions to combine the advantages of the two storage solutions have been limited – until Western Digital introduced the new high performance Black² Dual Drive earlier this year. Packed in a standard 2.5” laptop HDD design and occupies just one drive bay, the Black² should answer the need for speed and storage in today’s increasingly demanding world. Here is our review.

Western Digital Black² – PHP 13,950

• 120GB SSD + 1TB HDD Single Solution Dual Drive
• Standard 9.5mm 2.5-inch Drive Bay
• SATA 6GB/s
• 5 Year Warranty

As you can probably tell, the Western Digital Black² is one of the best storage upgrade solutions you can get on any laptop or small form factor PC – especially if there’s only one drive slot. The price may be a little higher than buying two drives separately, but then that defeats the purpose of a single drive. Performance was definitely impressive – giving us about 4x-5x faster boot time; game and app loading were significantly faster; and overall OS navigation (browsing directories & files) on the SSD was much improved. Even the HDD component of the Black² managed 100MBytes/s read/write on our tests – 2x more than our old hard drive. Simply put, it made our 6-year old laptop feel new again.

So if you’re in the market for a single solution SSD & HDD combo, consider picking up a WD Black² at your local retailer. They’re available at places like PC Hub (Gilmore), Thinking Tools (PC Quick Buy SM), PC Express (Beyond PC Megamall), and Blinque (Davao).