Agreed. I was excited when I read the headline, then quickly disappointed when I looked at the details. Any one of the faults on their own wouldn't be a deal breaker, but combined they make this a bit of a stinker for me. For example, I wouldn't mind managing my own storage, but doing that with a $300 price point and not being 7mm (so not able to install in a bunch of new laptops) is a big no from me. It's less than half the storage, but for that price I'll just pick up a 512GB SSD, even a midrange one like the Toshiba Q series which is $299 right now at the egg. Still waiting for a 500+GB hybrid drive in 7mm with a healthy chunk of NAND (e.g. 64GB) that is priced competitively.
The JMicron SSD controller seems to be competitive at reads but is only about 50% as fast as comtemporary SSDs at writes. The HDD is near the top of the pack in performance compared to other contemporary HDDs.
It's an expensive toy. Why do you think they only release these things to the consumer; because it's an experiment. It's crap compared to normal ssd for two very perceivable reasons: 1. Like the reviewer, the ssd gets tired up when both drives are accessed, and 2. Not enough memory channels. In SSDs the more memory channels the greater the speed, you can tell from the pics that this drive is garbage. It should be considered a hybrid drive, because its not a 120 GB ssd, not by a long shot.
Agreed that I think this is overpriced. A 500 GB SSD is now $299, and I'd rather have one of those. A 1 TB "SSHD" with a smaller cache is in the $100 range.
And on top of that, this drive isn't portable across operating systems. I want at least the option to run Linux or MacOS on any drive I buy.
So lower the price and make the implementation transparent to the OS (at least as the default option), and maybe it's worth it. In the long term I'll bet that's the direction things will go though. The price will eventually drop, and the implementation will improve.
So in short, cool idea, but not ready for prime time.
This is spot on. Support for a single OS on a hard drive is baffling. Imagine you're a Windows user who buys the drive but decides later to switch OSes or move the drive to a non-Windows system. Too bad!
The price isn't great but not outrageous. It has significantly dropped ($194, Amazon) since its release which puts it below the cheapest 480GB SSD. And if you need 1TB of space in your note of super small mITX case PLUS an SSD boot drive, this may be your only option. Of course I wouldn't complain with more competitive pricing.
I was waiting for this, but wait.. USB drive ?? what the hell !! + 9.5mm is not good...
I will go for 120GB SSD with 200MB/s+ write speed and a 500GB-1TB companion drive in 7mm package using single SATA connection and both appears as separate, I know the problem of SATA is that you can't connect two drives to it, but using a SATA multiplier solution... and because no company made such a solution, I turned to option 2
A laptop that has both 2.5" bay and miniPCIe/mSATA port... so we can add 128GB or 256GB SSD drive in the mSATA/miniPCIe and use the 2.5" bay for what ever drive we want... sadly for the Ultrabook market, most makers uses only one of these coz of size problems...
This isn't a USB drive, the interface is SATA 6Gbps as written in the table. The USB drive WD provides is only for drivers because by default Windows can only recognize the SSD part.
I read that portion as a USB interface as well for some reason. To completely clarify, the author means the drivers are included on a thumb drive, correct?
Looks like WD asked the wrong questions in that caching study. There are a lot of places I'd like to use this drive in, but can't justify the purchase with no caching and a higher price.
Your assessment of Apple's fusion drive is incorrect. The fusion drive feature is a type of tiered storage, not caching. Windows Server 2012 R2 has a similar feature in storage spaces. Linux will have something similar very soon called hot data tracking through it's vfs layer. WD is correct, this can be handled easily in software, they laid the foundation now it's time for MS at all. to use it properly.
Tiered storage and caching often go hand-in-hand. Caching requires a tiered storage setup but you can have tiered storage without caching or any software assistance. Fusion Drive is caching too because there's only a single volume and the software takes care of the data placement.
It has both. They put oft used files on the SSD and less used as well as files that wouldn't benefit from the fast reads of the SSD on the HDD. The portion of the SSD is also dedicated to caching which means anything in the cached area of the SSD could also be on the HDD (there is no need to duplicate it on the SSD). This is all configurable with CoreStorage and handled intelligently by the OS. It really is the best of both worlds.
Linux currently has two different caching methods: dm-cache and bcache. Both have been merged for a few releases now. Additionally Facebook released flashcache awhile back which is a simple kernel module that does write through caching.
Nope. There's a small USB drive included in the retail package that has drivers for the Black^2 drive. By default only the 120GB SSD is accessible and the drivers are needed to make the 1TB HD accessible as well.
A few points: - a single 1 TB platter in 2.5" would be a rediculous density improvement out of nowhere (Samsung just recently managed to get to 667 GB as the new record, Seagate introduced shingled magnetic recording and Hitachi even goes to Helium to push densities). It's surely 2x500 GB platters.
- Don't forget Intel SRT caching allows up to 60 GB to be used as cache. They were also the first to bring this to market, so they still have an attractive solution. There are also dedicated cache drives with nVelo Dataplex with more than 32 GB. Sure, they're not single 2.5" drives - but neither is the Fusion Drive.
- WD saying "people don't want caching" is very short-sighted. Many want a good performance, out-of-the-box solution with as little trouble as possible. They will not necessarily know all the ways to get there. Like Henry Ford once said: "If I had asked people what to build, they would have said faster horses."
The 1 platter claim caught me by surprise too. If true 2tb 3.5" platters should be possible as well making 10TB drives possible for people with gobs of data.
Interesting that this isn't an automatically managed setup, rather a manual one where the user picks where to put everything. I can see the benefits to that, but it would also be nice for it to automatically speed up what I need without me thinking about it. Some solutions like that (Fusion Drive iirc?) don't even reduce the total storage, as data is only held on one drive if I'm not wrong.
Which hybrid drive has 32GB cache, by the way? I have a Momentus XT 750 (the 7200rpm one, not the new slower one), and I still like the concept of hybrid drives, but it could definitely go for more NAND than 8GB. Quadrupling it to 32GB seems like it would be much better. You still may hit HD speeds sometimes, but with 8GB my drive already starts up in a flash and opens most productivity apps before you can even think of it, it's only slower for bigger apps.
I was also referring to caches in general as quite a few of the cheaper Ultrabooks use a cache equal or smaller than 32GB, while Apple went straight for 128GB.
I'm surprised AnandTech couldn't get this to work with via Terminal on OS X since it apparently shows up as 2 separate drives which means the CoreStorage commands should work, at least from my experience.
Perhaps the article should say "no official support"; but Anandtech hasn't gotten its sample in yet so there's no way that they could've tried any unofficial methods.
Also, since the HDD portion only shows up after installing the WD driver my suspicion is that it's not implemented the same way as a multi-drive eSATA enclosure with a port replicator. If they're doing something 'clever' instead it might not be accessible without their custom driver.
It should function as a cache, not as separate manageable storage. Thankfully this product is likely to push Seagate to make hybrid drives with a larger cache so they can compete for this market segment.
Can the caching functionality be enabled by SW? Although it may not be as effective, I wonder if some small utility monitoring the data accessed in background can provide a similar service. That said, it would have been nice to have some king of firmware option to switch the caching On/Off.
In theory, yes. Currently no caching software that I'm aware of supports this particular drive, but if this drive becomes popular that'll probably change.
Western Digital, please make a good SSD with 64GB that moves little used and streaming data to a 1-4TB. Let it be transparent so you don't need drivers and it works in every device with sata. The drive should tell that it is a 1-4TB SSD. That way you get 99% of the SSD experience and 100% of the HDD experience for $250.
$100 SSD, <$100 hard drive, price tag, $300. What?! :/ Or people can just keep whatever hdd comes with their laptop and put a mSATA SSD in it.
Also, i have the first gen Momentus XT in my laptop and pure SSD on my desktop. It's not substantially faster. I mean it is faster, but I only JUST notice it. Unless it's the first time I'm running something. But Windows launches fast, LOL launches fast, Mass Effect loads WAY faster than my old RAID stripe setup. If the game load times are slower than the pure SSD it's by so little a margin that I can't tell. So, with all that said, I'd really like to see a caching all in one with around 16GB on NAND on board. That should be plenty. They should do research though, test 16-24GB and figure out the optimal price/performance ratio. I suspect it's 16 but it could be 20 or 24.
Because they're cramming an SSD into the package along with the HDD, the drives you should be comparison shopping against are 7mm ones not 9.5. For WD that's the WD10SPCX which is $129 on Newegg. The same size constraints mean the SSD part is probably closer to mSata/m2 in cost than the 2.5" desktop models. Combined with the engineering involved in integrating them a baseline of $250 seems reasonable. However they're clearly branding it as as premium product; and +$50 for a black branded drive is on par with their higher end desktop drives.
PS This analysis actually has left me more skeptical about the single platter claim because there doesn't appear to be enough room in the $300 total to also stuff the obligatory new-process-soak-the-customer premium that always accompanies platter density increases.
That would justify the price if larger SSD which can cover a lot of people's storage needs weren't already darn close to that price point. It like if they had come out with this a year earlier they might've made a killing and probably gotten a lot of OEM sales in ultrabooks and such... Not so sure now, they can always drop the price tho.
Yeah, the hybrid drives still appear to be a day late and a dollar short. The last year has seen ultra portables drop the 2.5" bay entirely and larger gaming/workstation models have included both an mSATA/m2 slot and a 2.5" bay allowing them to roll their own. If WD had bundled it with a good windows driver for automatic cached/hierarchical storage they'd have something that would be a lot more compelling.
Yea, you can find 500GB class SSDs (480-512GB) for 300-350, in 7mm format no less. For most purposes that's enough storage in a laptop, and it gives max performance for all data without any effort in managing storage.
If this had been a caching hybrid drive and priced closer to 200 it would have sold like ice water in Death Valley, but the separated drive setup at 300 just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
I have the 1st gen Momentus XT in my laptop and an SSD in my desktop as well. And I agree with you. The Momentus XT even with just 4GB of space speeds up most applications to the point that I don't notice much difference between my laptop and my desktop in my normal workload. Yes, the desktop is faster, but the laptop with the hybrid drive does just fine. After initial boot Chrome, Firefox, and IE all launch in just a few seconds with little lag (I have 3 google email address I monitor and three browsers makes that easy to manage) and all my common Apps launch very quickly on my hybrid drive. Some of this may be Windows 8.1 doing a good job of managing a cache, but it really is a good experience.
That said, other actions such as installing new software and windows updates (the two things I notice that take the most time for me) are not sped up at all so they are like they would be on a spinner.
Overall I like my Momentus XT and would consider another one in the future. In my laptop I don't have a mSATA slot so this new WD drive looks interesting, but a $300 price is too much. I'd consider it for $220 or so. My 500GB Momentus XT was only $85 for reference.
I forgot to add that I don't think the testing that most reviewers do does the hybrid drives any favors. In real world use I think they are more effective than they get credit for and I imagine the 3rd generation is even better than mine.
The problem with this drive is almost all ultrabooks have adopted 7mm z height drives as the standard. If they release a single platter 500GB version with 120GB SSD that can fit in the 7mm height requirement it will probably sell better even tho 1 TB would be nicer.
I was hoping this was 120GB of flash caching a 1TB 7200RPM drive, similar to the 60GB of Intel SmartResponse I'm using. It's disappointing to find it's just a cheap 120GB SSD and a separate 5400RPM HD in the same physical package. Only people with a single 9.5mm bay laptop will benefit much from this.
Anybody who has ever tried to set up Intel SRT and knows what a nightmare that is would understand why the complete lack of support for caching by default is a huge mistake. OEMs and enthusiasts are the only ones who will get any real benefit from this drive...
Should the caching be done in software? Perhaps, but in that case WD needs to provide the software to do it, at least until OS-level support makes tiered storage as simple as plugging in a new regular HDD or SSD.
1. they can charge a premium because laptop space is at a premium. if i only have drive slot, then i don't care that i can get an ssd for $80 and a hdd for $80, because i'd need to spend $1000 on a new laptop.
2. the usb aspect of this is pretty weird, though if it ultimately works, it doesn't really matter.
3. my laptop has one 2.5" slot & 2 msata slots. this would be useful if i wanted to setup the msata as raid 0 or 1, and still have another drive to put something like the page & hibernate file in windows, which on a laptop with a lot of memory can take up a lot of space. in that use case, top performance & reliability aren't a huge concern, because the data is basically transient anyway.
Samsung 840 EVO + 1GB WD Black 1 TB = $200 and close to double the performance. This is a really good idea, but the price is horrible and only someone with a m-itx htpc would come close to touching this, and even then the 1 GB HDD would be pretty limiting for storage.
Nonetheless, this is a really good concept. Now just to get performance on par with standalone SSDs and get the price competitive and they will have a hit.
I'm not sure if it will be a success but I do think that there is a market for a drive like this and for all the people comparing it to multiple drive setups for the cost and/or performance they seem to have missed it. There are a lot of laptops out there that only have 1 HD bay and no mSata or other slots so you have the choice of a fast SSD or a large HD. This tries to provide you both.
The price premium does seem a little high and it probably would be nice if it included a software caching option too but ultimately I don't think either of those things changes the market it is targeted at. It is still significantly cheaper than a 1tb ssd.
Sure, if you've got the option separate hd's or a hd and a mSATA then that is probably going to be cheaper and/or faster but a lot of laptops don't have that option and more people are using a laptop as their primary machines. My home desktop has a 120gb ssd and a 2tb hd but I'd definitely consider something like this or make a mSATA a high priority on my laptop purchase if I was looking for a laptop to use as my primary machine.
Your point about mSATA or M.2 being in a minority of laptops is indeed true. There is a market for a 2.5" hybrid (or even combo like this) drive with enough NAND to store the entire OS/app selection on. But there are two huge problems here, the biggest of which is price that you have already mentioned. If this was $200 I think a very good argument could be made for it. The other problem is that it's a 9.5mm drive. So while I believe there is a good market for similar device, they've now cut that target market down into a fraction of the total addressable pie. I'd wager that a huge part of the market that wants a "bigger fast storage solution" that only has one 2.5" bay available would be satisfied with SSDs in the 500GB range. Those people are better served with something like a $300 512GB SSD. Then there's the part of the target market that has a single 2.5" bay that only accepts a 7mm height, which is quite a number of more recent thin and even not-so-thin laptops. I think each of its faults on their own aren't damning (price, height, non-caching/tiered firmware), but I believe the target market they are left with when you combine all of them is pretty tiny.
If it doesn't have caching I don't see the point except for a small niche. Most people don't want to have to think about where they put their data. I could see them putting it all on the SSD or all on the hard drive because it'd be easier to do it that way. Also, at that price you could buy a 500GB SSD.
As soon as a person confirms that you can use this drive to setup a Fusion Drive configuration in a Mac Mini I'll be purchasing one. I have been planning to get an SSD and I need 300+ GB or storage so with is a nice solution for me with out having to also mod my Mini to hold a 2nd drive.
Few things 1. Price, that is like 30 - 40% premium i am paying for. Which seriously i could do without. 2. Speed. SSD already saturate the SATA Bus. Until we get PCI-Express.... ( Which the current SSD still dont have a problem saturating it........ may be we need PCI-E 4.0 real soon ?) 3. JMircon? - Let's Move on 4. 5400 RPM is NOT an issue. You use SSD for faster speed. That is it. HDD no longer needs to concentrate on speed improvement. It needs capacity improvement. ( Which actually improves speed as well )
I think it is a brilliant idea. No longer would i have to use an external HDD.
I was actually trying to come up with a reason that I needed this, some business use or something...
Then I read the separate drive thing.
If it were optional, I'd go for it. As it is I've already got hard drives. The last thing I'm going to do is trust my data on a proprietary hard drive. I'll stick with an SSD and separate drive so than when I have problems I can use my standard data recovery tool set.
I am still a bit hesitant about the Momentus XT, though I've had no issues with it on my PS3 or my gaming computer.
Hey, it works under OSX (Maverick, 10.9.1) but It need to be initialized in a Windows computer! After that, you can have a 1.12TB single hard drive into your mac, but I really don't know how (or if) it manages the SSD and the HDD to optimize the performance or if it does just a big drive...
The author did not actually test this device at all. The USB device the came with the drive is a USB key, it only points to a URL to download the windows only device driver to see the 1TB partition (and it incidentally points to the wrong URL). This drive REQUIRES a windows device driver to see beyond the 128GB SSD partition, and is 9.5 mm in form factor. These two makes the drive much less useful in a lot of cases (such as non-windows OS use and any system that uses 7 mm drive bays).
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Diction - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Good idea, but they really need to charge closer to $200 to make this worth it, IMO.Caching software would also be great, at least as an option.
Bob Todd - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Agreed. I was excited when I read the headline, then quickly disappointed when I looked at the details. Any one of the faults on their own wouldn't be a deal breaker, but combined they make this a bit of a stinker for me. For example, I wouldn't mind managing my own storage, but doing that with a $300 price point and not being 7mm (so not able to install in a bunch of new laptops) is a big no from me. It's less than half the storage, but for that price I'll just pick up a 512GB SSD, even a midrange one like the Toshiba Q series which is $299 right now at the egg. Still waiting for a 500+GB hybrid drive in 7mm with a healthy chunk of NAND (e.g. 64GB) that is priced competitively.The Von Matrices - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Full performance and disassembly is online at http://www.storagereview.com/wd_black2_ssd_hdd_rev...The JMicron SSD controller seems to be competitive at reads but is only about 50% as fast as comtemporary SSDs at writes. The HDD is near the top of the pack in performance compared to other contemporary HDDs.
ericore - Tuesday, December 3, 2013 - link
It's an expensive toy. Why do you think they only release these things to the consumer; because it's an experiment. It's crap compared to normal ssd for two very perceivable reasons: 1. Like the reviewer, the ssd gets tired up when both drives are accessed, and 2. Not enough memory channels. In SSDs the more memory channels the greater the speed, you can tell from the pics that this drive is garbage. It should be considered a hybrid drive, because its not a 120 GB ssd, not by a long shot.barleyguy - Monday, December 2, 2013 - link
Agreed that I think this is overpriced. A 500 GB SSD is now $299, and I'd rather have one of those. A 1 TB "SSHD" with a smaller cache is in the $100 range.And on top of that, this drive isn't portable across operating systems. I want at least the option to run Linux or MacOS on any drive I buy.
So lower the price and make the implementation transparent to the OS (at least as the default option), and maybe it's worth it. In the long term I'll bet that's the direction things will go though. The price will eventually drop, and the implementation will improve.
So in short, cool idea, but not ready for prime time.
johnny_boy - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
This is spot on. Support for a single OS on a hard drive is baffling. Imagine you're a Windows user who buys the drive but decides later to switch OSes or move the drive to a non-Windows system. Too bad!The price isn't great but not outrageous. It has significantly dropped ($194, Amazon) since its release which puts it below the cheapest 480GB SSD. And if you need 1TB of space in your note of super small mITX case PLUS an SSD boot drive, this may be your only option. Of course I wouldn't complain with more competitive pricing.
johnny_boy - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
Correction: "...in your noteBOOK OR super small mITX case..."danwat1234 - Tuesday, December 30, 2014 - link
Luckily now the drive is only $145 on NeweggXajel - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
I was waiting for this, but wait.. USB drive ?? what the hell !! + 9.5mm is not good...I will go for 120GB SSD with 200MB/s+ write speed and a 500GB-1TB companion drive in 7mm package using single SATA connection and both appears as separate, I know the problem of SATA is that you can't connect two drives to it, but using a SATA multiplier solution...
and because no company made such a solution, I turned to option 2
A laptop that has both 2.5" bay and miniPCIe/mSATA port... so we can add 128GB or 256GB SSD drive in the mSATA/miniPCIe and use the 2.5" bay for what ever drive we want... sadly for the Ultrabook market, most makers uses only one of these coz of size problems...
Kristian Vättö - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
This isn't a USB drive, the interface is SATA 6Gbps as written in the table. The USB drive WD provides is only for drivers because by default Windows can only recognize the SSD part.Subyman - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link
I read that portion as a USB interface as well for some reason. To completely clarify, the author means the drivers are included on a thumb drive, correct?silenceisgolden - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Looks like WD asked the wrong questions in that caching study. There are a lot of places I'd like to use this drive in, but can't justify the purchase with no caching and a higher price.Mayuyu - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
I'd say they ask the wrong people. They might have surveyed a bunch of enthusiasts.shank15217 - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Your assessment of Apple's fusion drive is incorrect. The fusion drive feature is a type of tiered storage, not caching. Windows Server 2012 R2 has a similar feature in storage spaces. Linux will have something similar very soon called hot data tracking through it's vfs layer. WD is correct, this can be handled easily in software, they laid the foundation now it's time for MS at all. to use it properly.Kristian Vättö - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Tiered storage and caching often go hand-in-hand. Caching requires a tiered storage setup but you can have tiered storage without caching or any software assistance. Fusion Drive is caching too because there's only a single volume and the software takes care of the data placement.ATimson - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Fusion Drive isn't caching - if it were caching, the SSD would have copies of the original data. Instead, OS X actually moves the files over.solipsism - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
It has both. They put oft used files on the SSD and less used as well as files that wouldn't benefit from the fast reads of the SSD on the HDD. The portion of the SSD is also dedicated to caching which means anything in the cached area of the SSD could also be on the HDD (there is no need to duplicate it on the SSD). This is all configurable with CoreStorage and handled intelligently by the OS. It really is the best of both worlds.tuxRoller - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
Linux currently has two different caching methods: dm-cache and bcache. Both have been merged for a few releases now.Additionally Facebook released flashcache awhile back which is a simple kernel module that does write through caching.
XZerg - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
you have "drive" and "drivers" switched - WD supplies a USB driver with the drive to make...?
Kristian Vättö - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Nope. There's a small USB drive included in the retail package that has drivers for the Black^2 drive. By default only the 120GB SSD is accessible and the drivers are needed to make the 1TB HD accessible as well.THizzle7XU - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
I think if you put "USB thumb drive" it might be more clear for the confused.MrSpadge - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
A few points:- a single 1 TB platter in 2.5" would be a rediculous density improvement out of nowhere (Samsung just recently managed to get to 667 GB as the new record, Seagate introduced shingled magnetic recording and Hitachi even goes to Helium to push densities). It's surely 2x500 GB platters.
- Don't forget Intel SRT caching allows up to 60 GB to be used as cache. They were also the first to bring this to market, so they still have an attractive solution. There are also dedicated cache drives with nVelo Dataplex with more than 32 GB. Sure, they're not single 2.5" drives - but neither is the Fusion Drive.
- WD saying "people don't want caching" is very short-sighted. Many want a good performance, out-of-the-box solution with as little trouble as possible. They will not necessarily know all the ways to get there. Like Henry Ford once said:
"If I had asked people what to build, they would have said faster horses."
- 300$ for this is a bitter pill to swallow!
DanNeely - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
The 1 platter claim caught me by surprise too. If true 2tb 3.5" platters should be possible as well making 10TB drives possible for people with gobs of data.Kristian Vättö - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
WD told us that it's a single-platter drive (Techreport reported it as single-platter too) but I've sent them an email asking to confirm that.Kristian Vättö - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Just received a reply from WD and it's indeed a single-platter design.Kristian Vättö - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
WD just corrected themselves, it's a dual-platter drive as you guys suspected. Updated the article too.MrSpadge - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Thanks for the effort, Kristian. It's appreciated!tipoo - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Interesting that this isn't an automatically managed setup, rather a manual one where the user picks where to put everything. I can see the benefits to that, but it would also be nice for it to automatically speed up what I need without me thinking about it. Some solutions like that (Fusion Drive iirc?) don't even reduce the total storage, as data is only held on one drive if I'm not wrong.tipoo - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Which hybrid drive has 32GB cache, by the way? I have a Momentus XT 750 (the 7200rpm one, not the new slower one), and I still like the concept of hybrid drives, but it could definitely go for more NAND than 8GB. Quadrupling it to 32GB seems like it would be much better. You still may hit HD speeds sometimes, but with 8GB my drive already starts up in a flash and opens most productivity apps before you can even think of it, it's only slower for bigger apps.Kristian Vättö - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
WD has one but it's limited to OEMs: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6273/hands-on-with-w...I was also referring to caches in general as quite a few of the cheaper Ultrabooks use a cache equal or smaller than 32GB, while Apple went straight for 128GB.
tipoo - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Since it shows up as two volumes, I wonder if you could get it set up as a fusion drive?solipsism - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
I'm surprised AnandTech couldn't get this to work with via Terminal on OS X since it apparently shows up as 2 separate drives which means the CoreStorage commands should work, at least from my experience.• http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57550128-263/... (Is there markup that works with this archaic forum design?)
You can even use an SD card or USB flash drive with one or more other drives with OS X and CoreStorage to make an (overly) secure file system.
DanNeely - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Perhaps the article should say "no official support"; but Anandtech hasn't gotten its sample in yet so there's no way that they could've tried any unofficial methods.Also, since the HDD portion only shows up after installing the WD driver my suspicion is that it's not implemented the same way as a multi-drive eSATA enclosure with a port replicator. If they're doing something 'clever' instead it might not be accessible without their custom driver.
jaydee - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
So.. an $80 120GB SSD plus an $80 1TB 2.5" HD on the same package, with no interface between the two = $299? No thanks...Even for someone with a laptop, they mostly come with mSata ports for an SSD, with the 2.5" drive bay for a mechanical HD.
slayernine - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
It should function as a cache, not as separate manageable storage. Thankfully this product is likely to push Seagate to make hybrid drives with a larger cache so they can compete for this market segment.yankeeDDL - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Can the caching functionality be enabled by SW? Although it may not be as effective, I wonder if some small utility monitoring the data accessed in background can provide a similar service.That said, it would have been nice to have some king of firmware option to switch the caching On/Off.
Gigaplex - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
In theory, yes. Currently no caching software that I'm aware of supports this particular drive, but if this drive becomes popular that'll probably change.Fergy - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Western Digital, please make a good SSD with 64GB that moves little used and streaming data to a 1-4TB. Let it be transparent so you don't need drivers and it works in every device with sata. The drive should tell that it is a 1-4TB SSD. That way you get 99% of the SSD experience and 100% of the HDD experience for $250.Angrychair - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
This is a really puzzling product. Seems to be more nand than necessary and at a price and configuration that makes it an unappealing product.What's so hard about putting 32-64GB of nand into a hybrid drive? Seagate has the right idea but too conservative of an implementation.
Hrel - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
$100 SSD, <$100 hard drive, price tag, $300. What?! :/Or people can just keep whatever hdd comes with their laptop and put a mSATA SSD in it.
Also, i have the first gen Momentus XT in my laptop and pure SSD on my desktop. It's not substantially faster. I mean it is faster, but I only JUST notice it. Unless it's the first time I'm running something. But Windows launches fast, LOL launches fast, Mass Effect loads WAY faster than my old RAID stripe setup. If the game load times are slower than the pure SSD it's by so little a margin that I can't tell. So, with all that said, I'd really like to see a caching all in one with around 16GB on NAND on board. That should be plenty. They should do research though, test 16-24GB and figure out the optimal price/performance ratio. I suspect it's 16 but it could be 20 or 24.
DanNeely - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Because they're cramming an SSD into the package along with the HDD, the drives you should be comparison shopping against are 7mm ones not 9.5. For WD that's the WD10SPCX which is $129 on Newegg. The same size constraints mean the SSD part is probably closer to mSata/m2 in cost than the 2.5" desktop models. Combined with the engineering involved in integrating them a baseline of $250 seems reasonable. However they're clearly branding it as as premium product; and +$50 for a black branded drive is on par with their higher end desktop drives.PS This analysis actually has left me more skeptical about the single platter claim because there doesn't appear to be enough room in the $300 total to also stuff the obligatory new-process-soak-the-customer premium that always accompanies platter density increases.
Impulses - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
That would justify the price if larger SSD which can cover a lot of people's storage needs weren't already darn close to that price point. It like if they had come out with this a year earlier they might've made a killing and probably gotten a lot of OEM sales in ultrabooks and such... Not so sure now, they can always drop the price tho.DanNeely - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Yeah, the hybrid drives still appear to be a day late and a dollar short. The last year has seen ultra portables drop the 2.5" bay entirely and larger gaming/workstation models have included both an mSATA/m2 slot and a 2.5" bay allowing them to roll their own. If WD had bundled it with a good windows driver for automatic cached/hierarchical storage they'd have something that would be a lot more compelling.Belegost - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Yea, you can find 500GB class SSDs (480-512GB) for 300-350, in 7mm format no less. For most purposes that's enough storage in a laptop, and it gives max performance for all data without any effort in managing storage.If this had been a caching hybrid drive and priced closer to 200 it would have sold like ice water in Death Valley, but the separated drive setup at 300 just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
Hubb1e - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
I have the 1st gen Momentus XT in my laptop and an SSD in my desktop as well. And I agree with you. The Momentus XT even with just 4GB of space speeds up most applications to the point that I don't notice much difference between my laptop and my desktop in my normal workload. Yes, the desktop is faster, but the laptop with the hybrid drive does just fine. After initial boot Chrome, Firefox, and IE all launch in just a few seconds with little lag (I have 3 google email address I monitor and three browsers makes that easy to manage) and all my common Apps launch very quickly on my hybrid drive. Some of this may be Windows 8.1 doing a good job of managing a cache, but it really is a good experience.That said, other actions such as installing new software and windows updates (the two things I notice that take the most time for me) are not sped up at all so they are like they would be on a spinner.
Overall I like my Momentus XT and would consider another one in the future. In my laptop I don't have a mSATA slot so this new WD drive looks interesting, but a $300 price is too much. I'd consider it for $220 or so. My 500GB Momentus XT was only $85 for reference.
Hubb1e - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
I forgot to add that I don't think the testing that most reviewers do does the hybrid drives any favors. In real world use I think they are more effective than they get credit for and I imagine the 3rd generation is even better than mine.Laststop311 - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
The problem with this drive is almost all ultrabooks have adopted 7mm z height drives as the standard. If they release a single platter 500GB version with 120GB SSD that can fit in the 7mm height requirement it will probably sell better even tho 1 TB would be nicer.Impulses - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
But then it's barely larger than similarly priced SSD, there's a market for this, but it's a narrow one... And it's gonna shrink every year.Mr Perfect - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
I was hoping this was 120GB of flash caching a 1TB 7200RPM drive, similar to the 60GB of Intel SmartResponse I'm using. It's disappointing to find it's just a cheap 120GB SSD and a separate 5400RPM HD in the same physical package. Only people with a single 9.5mm bay laptop will benefit much from this.Guspaz - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Anybody who has ever tried to set up Intel SRT and knows what a nightmare that is would understand why the complete lack of support for caching by default is a huge mistake. OEMs and enthusiasts are the only ones who will get any real benefit from this drive...Should the caching be done in software? Perhaps, but in that case WD needs to provide the software to do it, at least until OS-level support makes tiered storage as simple as plugging in a new regular HDD or SSD.
Gigaplex - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Luckily this is targeted at enthusiasts and to a lesser extent OEMs. Casual consumers wouldn't look at something like this.6cef - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
1. they can charge a premium because laptop space is at a premium. if i only have drive slot, then i don't care that i can get an ssd for $80 and a hdd for $80, because i'd need to spend $1000 on a new laptop.2. the usb aspect of this is pretty weird, though if it ultimately works, it doesn't really matter.
3. my laptop has one 2.5" slot & 2 msata slots. this would be useful if i wanted to setup the msata as raid 0 or 1, and still have another drive to put something like the page & hibernate file in windows, which on a laptop with a lot of memory can take up a lot of space. in that use case, top performance & reliability aren't a huge concern, because the data is basically transient anyway.
danwat1234 - Tuesday, December 30, 2014 - link
The drive is down to $145 online now!Teizo - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Samsung 840 EVO + 1GB WD Black 1 TB = $200 and close to double the performance. This is a really good idea, but the price is horrible and only someone with a m-itx htpc would come close to touching this, and even then the 1 GB HDD would be pretty limiting for storage.Nonetheless, this is a really good concept. Now just to get performance on par with standalone SSDs and get the price competitive and they will have a hit.
kpb321 - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
I'm not sure if it will be a success but I do think that there is a market for a drive like this and for all the people comparing it to multiple drive setups for the cost and/or performance they seem to have missed it. There are a lot of laptops out there that only have 1 HD bay and no mSata or other slots so you have the choice of a fast SSD or a large HD. This tries to provide you both.The price premium does seem a little high and it probably would be nice if it included a software caching option too but ultimately I don't think either of those things changes the market it is targeted at. It is still significantly cheaper than a 1tb ssd.
Sure, if you've got the option separate hd's or a hd and a mSATA then that is probably going to be cheaper and/or faster but a lot of laptops don't have that option and more people are using a laptop as their primary machines. My home desktop has a 120gb ssd and a 2tb hd but I'd definitely consider something like this or make a mSATA a high priority on my laptop purchase if I was looking for a laptop to use as my primary machine.
Bob Todd - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Your point about mSATA or M.2 being in a minority of laptops is indeed true. There is a market for a 2.5" hybrid (or even combo like this) drive with enough NAND to store the entire OS/app selection on. But there are two huge problems here, the biggest of which is price that you have already mentioned. If this was $200 I think a very good argument could be made for it. The other problem is that it's a 9.5mm drive. So while I believe there is a good market for similar device, they've now cut that target market down into a fraction of the total addressable pie. I'd wager that a huge part of the market that wants a "bigger fast storage solution" that only has one 2.5" bay available would be satisfied with SSDs in the 500GB range. Those people are better served with something like a $300 512GB SSD. Then there's the part of the target market that has a single 2.5" bay that only accepts a 7mm height, which is quite a number of more recent thin and even not-so-thin laptops. I think each of its faults on their own aren't damning (price, height, non-caching/tiered firmware), but I believe the target market they are left with when you combine all of them is pretty tiny.BigLeagueJammer - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
If it doesn't have caching I don't see the point except for a small niche. Most people don't want to have to think about where they put their data. I could see them putting it all on the SSD or all on the hard drive because it'd be easier to do it that way. Also, at that price you could buy a 500GB SSD.Vinas - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
In sorry but the poor penmanship in this article made it uncomfortable to read.Ryan Smith - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
The poor penmanship?Penmanship: the art or skill of writing by hand.
YazX_ - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
5400 RPM!!!! seriouslyKSchwerin - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
As soon as a person confirms that you can use this drive to setup a Fusion Drive configuration in a Mac Mini I'll be purchasing one. I have been planning to get an SSD and I need 300+ GB or storage so with is a nice solution for me with out having to also mod my Mini to hold a 2nd drive.iwod - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
Few things1. Price, that is like 30 - 40% premium i am paying for. Which seriously i could do without.
2. Speed. SSD already saturate the SATA Bus. Until we get PCI-Express.... ( Which the current SSD still dont have a problem saturating it........ may be we need PCI-E 4.0 real soon ?)
3. JMircon? - Let's Move on
4. 5400 RPM is NOT an issue. You use SSD for faster speed. That is it. HDD no longer needs to concentrate on speed improvement. It needs capacity improvement. ( Which actually improves speed as well )
I think it is a brilliant idea. No longer would i have to use an external HDD.
MTN Ranger - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
This would have been the perfect PS4 hard drive replacement if it was cached and not two different logical drives. Bummer.0ldman79 - Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - link
I was actually trying to come up with a reason that I needed this, some business use or something...Then I read the separate drive thing.
If it were optional, I'd go for it. As it is I've already got hard drives. The last thing I'm going to do is trust my data on a proprietary hard drive. I'll stick with an SSD and separate drive so than when I have problems I can use my standard data recovery tool set.
I am still a bit hesitant about the Momentus XT, though I've had no issues with it on my PS3 or my gaming computer.
damonbonesi - Tuesday, December 17, 2013 - link
Hey, it works under OSX (Maverick, 10.9.1) but It need to be initialized in a Windows computer! After that, you can have a 1.12TB single hard drive into your mac, but I really don't know how (or if) it manages the SSD and the HDD to optimize the performance or if it does just a big drive...deecee12 - Sunday, February 23, 2014 - link
The author did not actually test this device at all. The USB device the came with the drive is a USB key, it only points to a URL to download the windows only device driver to see the 1TB partition (and it incidentally points to the wrong URL). This drive REQUIRES a windows device driver to see beyond the 128GB SSD partition, and is 9.5 mm in form factor. These two makes the drive much less useful in a lot of cases (such as non-windows OS use and any system that uses 7 mm drive bays).