Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Western Digital launches Black^2 SSD/hard drive hybrid
http://techreport.com/review/25690/wd-black-notebook-drive-combines-120gb-ssd-with-1tb-hdd
The basic idea is pretty simple: you take a 120 GB SSD and a 1 TB hard drive, and you stick them together in the standard 2.5" drive that laptops typically use, where the share a single SATA connection. Sounds pretty slick, right? Alas, there are several problems:
1) They picked just about the worst modern SSD they could find, with a JMicron controller. JMicron is the last meaningful SSD controller manufacturer not to have a demonstrably good SSD built on their products, so I have no idea why Western DIgital would go with them.
2) Putting two drives behind a shared SATA connection is a very non-standard thing to do, which means you're very reliant on Western Digital driver magic. Currently it's Windows-only, and flatly will not work with some SATA controllers at all. By default, only the SSD is visible, until you install Western Digital's special drivers to allow you to see both.
3) You can get a 120 GB SSD for $80. You can get a 1 TB, 2.5" hard drive for $80. So what will the combination cost you? Why, $300, of course.
The third point is the real killer, I think, as it means that it's a complete non-starter for anyone not limited by space to only a single 2.5" drive bay. And even there, you're limited to people who really do need a ton of space, as you're pushing close to what a 480 GB SSD costs. And even for people who want both an SSD and a lot of space in a small form factor, there are alternative SSD form factors that don't need to use the 2.5" drive slot.
People have long thought that there could be a lot of potential in mixing an SSD and a hard drive in a single drive. But the only two major hard drive manufacturers left are Western Digital and Seagate, and you can't make a decent hybrid drive if you can't make a decent hard drive at all. Seagate's idea of a hybrid drive was token amounts of read-only NAND flash that didn't offer much benefit, but did carry a huge price premium. Western Digital's idea of a hybrid drive is at least different from that, but not that great of an idea, either.
Comments
old news seagate been there done that.
In fact just caught the seagate 2T variation on a black friday deal and bought two of them last night.
This is nothing like what Seagate has done. Seagate's hybrid laptop drives are arguably inferior to modern versions of a plain old 7200 RPM hard drive of the sort that has been on the market for 15+ years.
When I first saw the press release - I thought "Wow, that sounds awesome - I'm glad someone finally did that".
Then I saw Jmicron, I was less excited.
Then I saw what they did with the SATA/driver thing. And I was over it.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
Some people who do not know any better will buy them. Kind of like the guy who bought the seagate hybrid drives a few posts above when he probably could have gotten a better 7200rpm drive for cheaper.
The controller they used was probably the least of their problems.
The fact that it requires some proprietary driver and has spotty support for SATA controllers, that's the real killer.
At first glance I thought this was similar to Intel's SRT or Apple's Fusion Drive, but using a single SATA device instead of 2 discrete drives.
But they aren't - it isn't SSD caching a HDD, it's a separate HDD and SSD, they show up as two separate drives --- which has it's benefits, you can control what goes on the SSD, for instance, and keep consistent access times. But when I saw the hardware incompatibilities and the proprietary driver, yeah... that sunk it. Not that SRT or Fusion Drive don't require drivers -- they do, but Apple being Apple built their's into the OS, and Intel being Intel has made their ubiquitous enough that Windows can install it for you. And it's not that SRT and Fusion Drive don't also have hardware incompatibilities: Good luck getting SRT to run on an nVidia SATA controller either.
But here, the only real benefit to the device is that it's 2 drives on one device - but I don't think that's a big enough draw because there's only a small audience that would need it and be willing to pay the premium price (and suffer through the drawbacks).
If I were upgrading an older laptop, I may not have a lot of choice, although I don't see this as an attractive option (maybe if there were better price parity). If I were designing a laptop, I still wouldn't consider this drive. I would put a bit of PCI-E based storage on the motherboard (potentially even soldered on if space were at an extreme premium), include a separate 2.5" drive in the drive bay (it could be an SSD or HDD), and you still get the best of both worlds without having to resort to a driver mess, and the option to gang them with something like SRT/Fusion Drive.
Supposedly the next Windows File System (ReFS) will support Logical Volumes, and may be able to do something similar to SRT/Fusion Drive at the OS level.