Perfect Notebook Storage: Seven 2.5” 500 GB Drives

Western Digital WD Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT

We already looked at this hard drive back in January. The Scorpio Blue by Western Digital is still a very good choice, as it happens to have the quickest access time of all 2.5” notebook drives, even including the new Momentus 7200.4 that spins at 7,200 RPM. We measured 16.2 ms in multiple test runs. Combined with the 83 MB/s peak read throughput and a good average transfer rate of 63.8 MB/s, the Scorpio Blue is strong in many of the I/O and application benchmarks, and is only beaten by the 7,200 RPM Momentus 7200.4, which offers more than 100 MB/s. However, there are some PCMark Vantage HDD tests in which the WD5000BEVT does not do well—check them out for details.

We also found that the power requirements were too high: 1.0 W idle power is about as much as the Momentus 7200.4 requires; 2.6 W for streaming reads is average, as is the 1.3 W for HD video playback. Finally, the 2.2 W power requirement for intensive I/O operations is average as well.

WD offers 500, 400, 320, 250, 160, 120, and 80 GB capacity models; there’s more information on the WD Web site.

Image 1 of 2