WD Black 2 Dual-Drive SSD+HDD Hybrid Review

Next we ran SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run without formatting and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.

SiSoft SANDRA 2012 Synthetic HDD Benchmarking

According to SiSoft SANDRA's physical disk benchmark, the WD Black 2 SSD offers strong read performance, but its write speed trails the other SSDs significantly.

ATTO Disk Benchmark More Information Here: http://bit.ly/btuV6w

ATTO is another "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

Because the ATTO Disk Benchmark requires that drives be partitioned and formatted, we're able to test the performance of both the WD Black 2's SSD and HDD. As you can see, the SSD portion of the drive offers decent performance in the read tests, but still trails the standalone SSDs. In the write test, the WD Black 2 is way behind.  The HDD performs relatively well, however, and consistently offered transfer speeds over 110MB/s, once block sizes exceeded 8K.