Scorpio Blue: Big Notebook HDDs Go Mainstream

Efficiency With Workstation I/O

The workstation I/O efficiency benchmark tortures the drive with a workload that is based on lots of small, random I/O operations.

Drives with quicker access times typically show the best performance for random I/Os as well. In this case, the Scorpio Blue is limited by its 5,400 RPM spindle speed—as a result, its performance is okay, but not mind blowing.

However, the power required to deliver the measured amount of I/O operations per second as much lower than the measurements we took on other drives.

Finally, the WD drive takes the performance per watt crown in this category as well. It reached this result not because of stellar performance, but because of a solid balance between good performance and low power consumption.