The continuing tug of war between performance-orientated SSDs and capacity-focused hard drives has created a demand for ‘hybrid’ solutions which allow consumers to experience the best of both worlds. That’s exactly what Western Digital is aiming to accomplish with their new Digital Black² Dual Drive solution. It’s a particularly innovative, unique take on the two issues that normally plague these hybrid solutions: a lack of NAND and very little customizability.

In order to understand why Western Digital is approaching these new drives from a different perspective, the current hybrid situation needs to be explained. The typical hybrid drive combines a relatively large but low speed spindle-based HDD with a few gigabytes of onboard NAND to boost performance. This NAND is set aside for caching purposes and works alongside built-in algorithms to “remember” your most-used programs by keeping the necessary boot files in quick-access storage. However, since the amount of NAND is limited, the onboard controller has to decide which chunks of data have the luxury of being accelerated. This certainly does boost performance but only in a finite number of applications and consumers have no say in what the controller thinks is important.