Solid State Drives - made from high performance flash memory - offer many advantages over conventional mechanical drives. For a start: they are a lot faster; they use less power; they are silent; they are immune to physical knocks. But, they are also considerably more expensive. Whereas a standard 500GB mechanical HDD for a laptop costs less than £40, the SSD equivalent is in the order of £250. This price will undoubtedly come down with time, but for now it means their usage has to be very selective.
SSDs give their best results with operating systems and applications, giving quick start-up times for Windows and applications that load instantly. With regular data, the benefits are less clear cut, particularly given the price differential. Accordingly, enthusiasts and those who need raw performance will often use two drives: a small SSD to hold Windows and a regular high capacity HDD to hold regular data. It's quite easy to do this on a large desktop-type computer, but what if you have a small form factor PC or a laptop?
Western Digital think they have the answer with their new WD Black2 drive. This is the size of a standard 2.5" form factor laptop drive, but inside the unit are TWO totally separate, independent drives. One of these is a 120GB SSD drive - this appears as C: and is where you install Windows and applications. The other is a 1TB (1000GB) mechanical hard drive that appears as the D: drive and is where you store your data. There is only one SATA interface on the unit; internal electronics do the necessary jiggery-pockery to make the laptop (or whatever) aware that there are two drives. Note that this is not a so-called hybrid drive, where a conventional mechanical drive is boosted with a small amount of flash memory to improve cacheing and performance under some circumstances - this is two totally separate drives to give the best of both worlds.
The WD Black2 comes nicely packaged, with software and a USB gizmo to help transfer the operating system and data from an existing drive. It is possible to level some criticisms: the SSD performance is not stellar, but of course vastly better than that of a HDD. The drive itself is 9.5mm thick, meaning it will fit many but not all laptops (some are restricted to 7mm drives). And it is pricey: at around £250 it is twice the price of buying separate SSD and HDD drives of the same capacity. Nevertheless, it is an intriguing option which opens up the benefits of both performance and capacity to laptop users. Presumably the price will eventually fail, and such drives