Western Digital Scorpio Black 2.5" 750GB 7200RPM Benchmark

Hey everyone,

Here is a review of my new 750GB WD Scorpio Black. It is just about the fastest laptop hard drive money can buy, with the exception of the 500GB Seagate Hybrid. The price is currently $110 on Amazon.

I ran several tests of the hard drive. There is no data on it at all and has been only powered on for several hours. Here are some of the benchmarks.

Western Digital 750GB Benchmarks:

Read Speeds 64KB Block Size:



Write Speeds 64KB Block Size:



Random Access Speeds:



HDTach Read Speeds Quick Bench:



CrystalDiskMark:



Overall, this drive looks great. It is the fastest non-hybrid hard drive out right now, with the only competitor being the 500GB Seagate Momentus XT. However, the Western Digital even beats it out on various tests.

Comparisons:

For example, here is the 500GB Momentus XT's CrystalDiskMark:



In sequential and 512KB, the 750GB Western Digital spanks this $100 drive. It is not even too far behind in the other tests either.

In this image, the 750GB Western Digital has 18MB/s faster write speeds:



In comparison to the 750GB Seagate drive, according to Overclockers Club who tested the read speeds running HD Tune Pro 3.50, the 750GB Seagate musters a wimpy 80MB avg. read speed, which is 21-22MB/s behind the Western Digital 750GB drive.

By the way, in order to make better comparisons, we need some members of the forum to run the exact same tests as I did, with the same program versions (latest ones for me).

Reliability:

Now in terms of reliability the 500GB Momentus XT gets:

55% (256) 5 Eggs
16% (75) 4 Eggs
9% (42) 3 Eggs
7% (33) 2 Eggs
13% (58) 1 Egg

So 13% received bad drives and 71% are happy with their drives, giving 4 eggs or higher.

As with the Seagate 750GB drive,

74% (53) 5 Eggs
6% (4) 4 Eggs
4% (3) 3 Eggs
1% (1) 2 Eggs
15% (11) 1 Egg (1 very bad noise problem, 10 failures)

15% received bad drives and 80% gave it 4 eggs or higher.

With the 750GB Western Digital Scorpio Black,

78% (40) 5 Eggs
4% (2) 4 Eggs
6% (3) 3 Eggs
4% (2) 2 Eggs
8% (4) 1 Egg (4 failures)

Only 9% received bad drives whereas 82% gave it 4 eggs or higher. One thing worth noting is that although the 750GB Western Digital does not have as many reviews as the 750GB Seagate, the Seagate has been around for quite some time and still has a somewhat high failure rate. Usually the duds are in the first few months of production, but since the Seagate has been in production for over a year, and the Western Digital only a few months, I'd say the Western Digital drive is/will be the most reliable. Most users complained about the high noise output however using it in my x305 with my NZXT Cryo fan speeds on low, I did not hear anything.

Conclusion:

For $110, I say this drive is a great deal for someone wanting the largest and fastest drive they can get. If you care about slightly faster random speeds and a faster boot up time, then you may want the Seagate Momentus XT priced at $100. However, not only is that hybrid drive new technology that seems to be a bit on the unreliable side, it has 250GB of less storage and is only $10 less. If you will be using this Western Digital as a secondary hard drive, IMO it is your best option. In terms of temperatures, I have yet to see this drive pass 39 degrees Celsius, or 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Right now it is running a pretty cool idle temp. at 31 degrees Celsius/88 degrees Fahrenheit.

In terms of the $90 Seagate Momentus 750GB 7200RPM drive it is an option that IMO shouldn't be taken. Not only is it a lot slower, but it seems less reliable than the Western Digital.

Feel free to send me a PM with your 500GB Seagate Momentus XT or 750GB Seagate Momentus hard drive benchmarks so I can make a better comparison.

 

Very good review. Thank you.

I have a Momentus XT and what I wish is that the HDD itself would be faster. It's definitely still early tech.

I can't run benchmarks today though.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I will be updating this review after I get my files on here (around 100GB-150GB) to show how the drive speed is affected after a good amount of data is written to it.

 

Impressive results. The first 100GB reads at >120MB/sec with 15ms. That's very nice for an OS.

Now it's Seagate's turn to release a 750GB Hybrid.

 

How much energy does this baby suck compared to the momentus/other drives?

Nice review btw.

 

Is it silent?

 

I am not sure how to determine the energy usage, any ideas for that?

It is not silent but for me it is pretty quiet.

 

I got one too, it's an amazing drive, quiet, no seek noise, no vibration (2010 MacBook Pro)

 

Thanks for the nice review. Still hesitating whether to take the Scorpio Black now or wait for the 7K750 Hitachi. The WD is supposed to be better in multitasking than the current 7K500 as I see.

 

I'm still considering whether to get this or the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid. Currently I have WD Scorpio Black as my primary hard disk. ALso considering if i should clone my OS to the new and presumably faster hard disk.
Opinions guys?

 

Nice, same here

Based on hard drive failure rates, Hitachi has one of the highest in the industry.

If you don't mind a bit of a higher chance of getting a dud with the Seagate and if you want fast boot times and slightly faster random speed times (programs) then go for the Seagate. But IMO, since the random speeds are so slow on both drives, it really makes little difference. At these speeds of 100mbs, etc. the Western Digital makes the most sense when you look at price, size, and reliability.

 

Booting and launching programs will be a lot faster on the Seagate.

Other than that it will be hard to notice a difference.

 

Personal product reviews are not a good indicator of product reliability. They are just personal opinions.

 

I prefer this drive more than the Momentus XT. The XT just does not have enough of an advantage to make it worth losing out on an extra 250GB of gaming storage.

 

I have a 500gb XT and I love it.
Although I hear this drive is quite problematic with Macs.

 

Agreed, counting the stars is very unreliable.

 

Although personal reviews are unreliable, most are verified buyers. I will include an industry failure rate graph later that coincides with the Newegg reviews.

 

To clarify: I'm not saying the reviews are unreliable, I'm saying counting the stars is unreliable.

One person gives a 1 star rating for too much noise, while the other gives a 1 star rating for a failure.

Stars mean little. It would be much more interesting if someone would take the time and count actual failures, like we did for SSDs.

 

well, in my opinion, the stars are indicative of whether it's worth buying or not. reliability and performance cannot be derived from the stars. now if the the percentages were flip flopped and 80% 1 or 2 stars on x brand drive and 80% 4 or 5 stars you can make a general conclusion about what you're getting. but we're seeing 75%+ 4 or 5 stars on both seagate and western digitals. btw, i prefer western digitals because they have always been the quietest and coolest and performed good enough for me, performance and reliability wise. haven't had a western hdd poop on me yet.

 

Unfortunately I cannot find the site that showd the reliability stats for the drives. However, I updated the Seagate 750GB and WD 750GB failure rates. The Momentus XT has too many reviews

 

the stars is a good way to filter(so we can further determine if a low star rating can be considered as failure, i doubt people would give 3+ star on a drive that failed), other than that it is meaningless.

 

I've been reading a lot of the reviews lately. In my opinion the stars are meaningless because a lot of the 1 and 2 star ratings come from people with wrong expectations and/or don't know how to use it.

Some examples:
'My C300 isn't reaching it's quoted speeds in Ubuntu' (Duh!)
'My Vertex 2 isn't reaching quoted speeds in CrystalDiskMark' (Duh!!)
'My Vertex 3 120GB has lower 4K random performance than I expected'

Another example is the (probably large) amount of people in the Momentus XT feedback that didn't think about upgrading the firmware.

 

Is this better than the Scorpio Blue? It seemed like all the obvious tradeoffs existed from what I saw of (Storage Review's?) benchmark tests.

Blue had some parking noises that seemed worse as the secondary HDD vs. the primary. If there's anything disturbing about the Blue, I'd say it was the parking noise. How's the Black on this?

 

The Black would be superior and the noise is unnoticeable for me.

 

In a laptop like that I probably wouldn't notice it either

It's mainly the thin and light laptops that let noise through.

 

Well not to revive a dead thread but I installed a 750 GB Scorpio Black inside my 2nd Z61t today and reimaged it with the recovery discs. Don't have all the benchmarks yet, but like my 320 GB it is quiet (no excessive vibrations that people have complained about). Heat is okay, runs hotter than the Scorpio Blue drives and the MomentusLP drive in my 1st Z61t. Replaced an old 100 GB Hitachi drive still with Lenovo's CRU stickers on it.

 

Bump so more people may see this.

 

Bump for a question

At the 250/320GB level does the Scorpio Black also offer the best performance?

 

It might be the Hitachi Z7K320, seeing as it only has one 320GB platter. But good luck finding it.

 

Samsung has a single platter 320GB drive too. HM320JI or so.

With WD it's hard to find out which 320GB Black is single platter. They do exist though.

 

Great Review! It would have been nice to see this before I ordered mine a few days ago. I should have done more research. It looks like I made a good choice though.

 

Thanks a lot Jas. You made a great choice though, I don't think there is a better drive out right now for storage. Those 1TB drives are slower and more unreliable.

 

I've got a question. When I formatted my Scorpio only 700GB was available. I know I'm not going to get the full 750GB, but 50GB is a lot to not be able to use. Is this normal for this hard drive or can I fix this? Thanks.

 

It's normal for all hard drives. Manufacturers report capacity in bytes, eg 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. But technically there are 1024 bytes in a megabyte, so 1 GB really is 953 MB.

 

750GB= 750x1000x1000x1000 bytes in HDD/SSD manufacturers eyes.

But Windows sees it as:

750,000,000,000 / 1024/1024/1024 = 698.49GB

So for each GB a storage manufacturer claims it is only 698.49/750 or ~93% of that capacity when calculated in a base 2 (like computers do...) environment.

 

So you can run these drives on a M17X R2 in raid 0 right i saw one guy in another thread about this drive running his M1730 with these awesome drives.

 

Thanks for the help. It makes perfect sense now.

 

Yes you can run these in RAID.

Btw, I used up 214GB of space and am now seeing 116MB/s max read speeds using HD Tune Pro so it went down 8mb/s. Not too bad.

 

So, here is an update of my drives performance after being 47% full. I just ran a defrag prior to this benchmark.



Here is the old image:



The fact that this drive still maintains the same speeds is a testament to the drive's quality. For some reason, write speeds are higher than before and read speeds are a bit lower.

Just wanted to update you guys on this, to show that this drive is still the fastest SATA-3.0GBps drive out there for a laptop.

 

The platter section may still be faster but the new 750GB XT may actually be faster for real world use. If the rumored SSD write cache ever comes to play the XT would be a hands down winner..................

 

When the 8GB nand 750GB XT makes mince meat out of desktop Scorpio Blacks (1TB models) and even embarrasses vRaptor's, it will make the notebook Scorpio Black seem like a 4200 RPM drive from the dark ages.

Even without the write caching enabled, the XT is a different and much more powerful beast and quieter, with less vibrations and I wouldn't be surprised if it used less power too.

(I want to replace all my systems with mechanical HDD's with the new XT's - that's how good they are - be they desktop or notebooks).

And just to be clear: I'm not talking about benchmarks here - as usual, I'm talking about real world use in identical workload/usuage situations.

 

Of course. But I am just talking about mechanical drives. The hybrid model Seagate offers has come a long way and is clearly the best of both worlds.

 

Hybrid models are mechanicals also - just like you can't be 'a little bit pregnant' you also can't be 'a little bit solid state'.

They are just mechanical drives at their pinnacle of performance.

To ignore the XT's at this time when mechanicals are being talked about is to live in the dark ages. When the 3.5" XT Hybrids come out early next year, all other HDD's will effectively go the way of the Dodo (just like 4200 RPM drives did). I'm sure there will be massive discounts until the old stock clears - but those 'sale' prices will only underline just what the old tech is/was worth.

Anyone wanting a modern system at that time will not be foolish enough to pick up those old tech HDD's; unless the XT's come in a too small capacity for their needs (I might be the first for the 4TB drives in that case).

 

For storage drives, the XT's make no sense.

 

Qing, sorry, you're wrong there.

If reading, creating, modifying many small pdf's (as I do when invoicing, for example) an XT makes a lot of sense.

If all you store on it are files larger than ~2MB's, then you may not notice a difference - if however you use it like I do or even more 'intensively' by moving the Users folder to it (lots of small files...), then an XT is a great way to fly.

 

Can we please stop the "XT won't work for data / storage / secondary" drive arguments? That is just not true, unless you mean the drive is just a place to place backups and repeatable reads never occur.

I've answered this on enough threads that ppl should have seen it by now. If anyone has any kind of library for music, movies, photos, images, code, (or the "you name it resource" stored in files which are read over and over again) in which I/O is not limited by an app, the XTs make perfect sense and absolutely rock if those files are read multiple times. In my case, time spent waiting on disk I/O gave me back an easy 20-30 minutes in the course of a long work day.

 

You forget also reading data, directory info and the like. I use a SSD for primary and a XT 500GB for data. I love the XT as directory and other files just fly.................

 

I see. Well XT's can simply be seen as hybrids and therefore not fully mechanical or fully mechanical drives with flash technology. Now in this case when I indicate that the 750GB is the fastest, I mean comparing it to only 100% mechanical drives.

I do agree that the regular hard drives will be phased out with these hybrids and eventually in about 7-10 years I say SSDs will become commonplace.