Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB mini-review

Hey everyone,

I just picked up a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB/5.4K RPM/8MB laptop hard drive from BB to replace my second HDD and double my hard drive space in my X205-SLi4. I just did a quick benchmark of the drive with HDTune to see how well it runs. Here are some pics:









For comparison, here is the benchmark of one of the two Hitachi 160GB/7.2K RPM/16MB drives that originally came with my laptop:







It looks like the WD drive improves the average speed by around 25%, but does a little worse in the latency and CPU usage. I can't comment on sound because I still have a Hitachi as my primary drive. I'm just going to use this drive for storage and possibly Windows 7 Beta and Ubuntu 8.10 Hope these benchmarks help someone in their decision to buy a new laptop hard drive.

-J.B.

 

Thanks
Your review has encouraged me to check my current HD using HDTune as a comparison and needless to say your WD5000BEVT is double the speed of my WD1600BEVS in transfer rates. One thing though, how do you find the drive acoustically?

 

You are not using SATA AHCI mode?

Burst rate is too law for me ....

 

he said he cant comment on sound.

 

CPU usage isn't really anything to have in comparison, it's not even near correct measured (as it measures the total cpu-load that is for the moment put on the whole system hehe), so it's only showing correct if you have 0 other applications running that withdraws 0% cpu-usage of totals

Just so you know!

You should get better results with that drive though, the average of what i've seen is ~65MB/s on those! But according to the graph, you have it set for the fastest test-speed which isn't as accurate You can change the setting clicking the two yellow "wheels" up right in HD Tune under "benchmark"

 

Burst speed depends on what system it's running on and if it's running on a SATA 1.5Gb/s or 3.0Gb/s controller.

Burst rate isn't that important anyways. What do you need it for? Are you doing anything superspecial with your notebook so you need more?

 

Knew it. Wonder why it so low. Normally it's 80+

 

I do appreciate that but some people have complained/mentioned of a constant "clicking" and I just wanted to see if that had ever transpired

 

Maybe because he made a "fast" test which is more inaccurate.

However, 60 vs 80, you couldn't tell a difference

 

Yes, that burst rate is low: See my results in this thread.

My WD5000BEVT is quite quiet but recently it has started to make a single "clunk" noise when I turn on the computer.

John

 

Mines done that since day 1
I thought it was normal hahahahaha

 

My burst rate is pretty much the same as his...

 

Someone please explain the importance of burst rate.

 

Burst Rate doesn't matter. If the R/W speeds, and access times are good, thats fine. If you wanna bench the Interface Speed, HDTach is better.

And the HD Tune result for the 7K200 is pretty screwed up. It should do about 50MB/s read....

Burst Rate is the max data transfer rate between the drive interface and the system (or OS).

Have a look at HD Tune's Manual.. http://www.hdtune.com/hdtune.html

 

burst rate is actually the speed at which completely random files can be written to the drive.
It really doesnt impact drive performance much at all, so dont worry about it.

K-TRON

 

Hey Guys,

I'm back with a couple more things about this drive. It does seem to be quieter at seeking than the Hitachi 7K160 next to it inside my laptop. Also, when I am using my Vista Ultimate stock Toshiba install on my Hitachi, the WD drive parks its heads quite too often for my liking. This is a typical "clunk" noise that happens every like 10 seconds but it doesn't happen in either install of Windows 7 that are on that WD drive.

-J.B.