Western Digital WD Black² 2.5-inch Dual Drive (SSD + HDD)

My older system is Serial ATA-1.5 and one of the oldest SATA standards: “First-generation SATA interfaces, now known as SATA 1.5 Gbit/s, communicate at a rate of 1.5 Gbit/s, and do not support Native Command Queuing (NCQ). Taking 8b/10b encoding overhead into account, they have an actual uncoded transfer rate of 1.2 Gbit/s (150 MB/s). The theoretical burst throughput of SATA 1.5 Gbit/s is similar to that of PATA/133, but newer SATA devices offer enhancements such as NCQ, which improve performance in a multitasking environment”.

What this proves is even with the oldest SATA standard a user can expect big improvements.

• ATA Rev. 1 – 1.5 150MB/s (this review)
• ATA Rev. 2.0 300MB/s
• ATA Rev. 3.0 600MB/s
• ATA Rev. 3.2 1969MB/s

HD Tune Original WD Scorpio Blue HDD shows minimum 1.2MB/sec, max speeds of 67.5MB/sec and average 47.9MB/sec. for the old HDD.

Minimum 1.2MB/sec, maximum 67.5MB/sec and average 47.9MB/sec. for the old HDD compared to 55.6MB/sec, 178.9MB/sec and 95.6MB/sec. three times the average overall increase.

Let’s compare the original WD Scorpio Blue HDD to the new WD Black HDD.

The WD Scorpio Blue provides transfer rates around 60MB / Sec read and 55MB / Sec writes.

Comparing the original 60MB / sec read and 55MB / sec writes to the new 105+MB / sec I’d say we can expect about twice the performance for HDD work.