Wish to set up your laptop's storage the way you do with your desktop? Your wish is instantly granted with the new release from Western Digital (WD) Black Dual Drive.

For great performance and large data capacity, you need to use a small solid-state drive (SSD) as the main drive that hosts the operating system and a regular hard drive (HDD) as a secondary drive for data. This is difficult to achieve in a laptop due to space constraint.

WD Black 2 Dual Drive is just one physical drive with two physical volumes. This hard drive contains two internal drives: one is a 128 SSD and the other is a 1 TB HDD. Imagine this much memory storage packed in a 2.5 inch, 9 millimeters tall laptop drive. According to WD, the SSD part is capable of 350 MB/sec sequential read and 140 MB/sec sequential write. WD claimed that the dual-drive setup is for users who want more control of which data get cached.

This dual laptop drive, however, is not a solid-state hybrid drive. The 128 SSD and 1 TB HDD are never merged together. In a report by Cnet, the two drives may be merged into a single partition of 1.2 TB. Although, in such a case, the system will not be at optimum performance because it cannot read where the SSD part starts and ends.

WD Black 2 Dual Drive appears like a standard SSD when installed in a laptop. The SSD can be used to install an operating system or clone an existing system to it. It comes with a WD Black 2 Installation software needed to unlock the HDD portion of the drive and format it into a new partition. With WD Black 2, you get 2 separate drives priced at $299.