WD Dual Drive

Western Digital (WD) today released a laptop drive that combines a full-sized solid-state drive (SSD) with a 1TB hard disk drive, offering users high performance or high capacity storage through a single interface.

The company claims its WD Black Dual Drive is 17 times faster than a traditional hard disk drive and costs about three times less per gigabyte than an SSD. The new drive only works with Windows hardware and will retail for $299. The drive does not come as a stand-alone unit, but as a kit that includes installation instructions and hardware. It comes in a standard 9.5mm high, 2.5-in diameter form factor, and has a SATA III, 6Gbps interface.

The WD Black Dual Drive combines a 120GB SSD with a 1TB hard disk drive.

Desktop computers have offered dual drive slots for years, allowing users to install a low-capacity SSD for the OS and heavily used applications, and a slower, but much higher capacity hard disk drive (HDD) for mass data storage.