WD Black Dual-Drive 120GB SSD + 1TB HDD Hybrid Review

Into The Black and Setup

Getting the drive apart was not fun at all and in fact downright scary. It took quite a bit of time and patience to break down. We say this a lot, but seriously, do not try this at home! There’s a significant chance of damaging the delicate PCB that’s very firmly taped down and there’s no undo for that mistake.

The SATA interface was easy enough to take off as it was merely held by several small screws seen on the face of the drive. This carries a Marvell SATA bridge chip that allows concurrent access to both the SSD and HDD.

When we finally managed to peel away the SSD portion of the drive from the HDD portion the HDD was revealed to be a Blue Slim (7.0mm z-height) drive which makes this whole product possible as it leaves enough space for an additional 2.5mm of SSD to be added to the top to make a standard 9.5mm height drive. The dual platter hard drive carries a 16MB cache and spins at 5400RPM.

The SSD portion of the drive is diminutive as well taking up only roughly 1/3 the drive length. It’s managed by a JMicron JMF667H controller with the 128GB of 20nm MLC NAND split across two chips.

This is the key that gets it all started. Prior to loading the software, only the SSD portion of the drive is available.

Most of the major languages are covered!

Zoom, zoom…sorry, wrong company. Is that the WD F1 car that we detailed here?

This is where we get down to business. Once you click install, the magic happens and then requires a reboot. After rebooting, the HDD portion of the drive should be visible and ready to rock. There may be a delay before it boots to the desktop while everything is configured.