GNet Solutions » Hardware Hacking

I recently bought a Western Digital Black2 Hybrid SSD drive for my laptop. My initial assumption was that the drive would show up as two different drives, however this assumption was wrong; whole drive shows up as a single contiguous drive and NOT as a 120GB SSD and 1TB spinning disk.

When I received the drive, only 120GB were accessible, and the extra 1TB was missing; the extra 1TB can only be initialized with the partitioning utility provided by Western Digital.

To start, the 1TB needed to be initialized; I needed to download the hard drive partitioning utility (which is Windows only) in order for the extra 1TB to show up. Once the extra 1TB was initialized I wanted to partition my drive using gparted on a live lubuntu disc.

• This is the partition layout of my hybrid drive for a Windows 7 partition (100MB + 50GB) and an Arch Linux Partition (~61.5GB); along with a 1TB extended partition holding an NTFS partition for shared storage:
  

  fdisk -l
  

  • Example output:
    

    Disk /dev/sda: 1120.2 GB, 1120239009792 bytes
    255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 136194 cylinders, total 2187966816 sectors
    Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    Disk identifier: 0x00075f14
    
       Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
    /dev/sda1            2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
    /dev/sda2   *      206848   105064447    52428800    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
    /dev/sda3       105064448   234440703    64688128   83  Linux
    /dev/sda4       234440704  2187966815   976763056    5  Extended
    /dev/sda5       234442753  2187966463   976761855+   7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
    

From the looks of it the SSD is 120032.592MB and when the western digital utility initialized the extra 1TB it split the SSD off at sector 234440703. So when working with tools like fdisk or gparted make sure the partitions for the SSD and HDD are created correctly.