Despite its poor file copy performance, the Black2’s SSD outpaced the Agility 4 with 431MB/s, which was also several times faster than the HDD portion’s 115MB/s – yet again the slowest drive we tested.
While the Black2’s SSD kept up with current generation rivals in the sequential read test, it’s a different story when measuring write performance. The flash portion only offered 146MB/s, which was even slower than the WD Black 4TB and Velociraptor 1TB disk drives. In fact, the Black2’s SSD was only 28% faster than its HDD, not to mention that the 840 Evo was three times faster.
The random 512K test showed again that the Black2’s SSD has strong read performance with a throughput of 394.2MB/s, only 5% slower than the 840 Evo and nine times faster than the Black2’s disk drive.
The flash portion of WD’s new combo drive has repeatedly struggled with write performance and in the random 512k test it offered a bandwidth of only 146.8MB/s, the same as the company’s Velociraptor.
There was a huge performance advantage favoring SSDs in the random 4K-QD32 read test and the Black2’s flash drive faired about as well as the 840 Evo with 232MB/s, while its disk drive sat below 2MB/s with the other HDDs.
This time the Black2’s SSD write performance wasn’t as poor as we have experienced, landing just 22% behind the 840 Evo, though it’s worth noting that the Evo isn’t exactly the fastest drive in this test.
