Hybrid hard drives have been on the market for a while. The are basically a standard hard drive that feature a small amount of SSD built onto the drive for caching purposes. They offer a slight boost in performance but their cache size limits their ability to offer as high of performance as a full SSD. Western Digital is looking to solve this with their new Black² dual drive. Rather than just an SSD as a cache, it incorporates a full 120GB SSD drive with a 1TB hard drive in a single 2.5-inch drive that is only 9mm high. This sounds like the perfect solution for those that want to upgrade a laptop that only has space for a single drive to SSD performance without sacrificing storage space. There are a few catches though. Continue reading →