WD Scorpio Black and Scorpio Blue Hard Drive Review

by Jerry Jackson

The hard drive inside your notebook is far more important than most people realize. Not only is the capacity important in terms of how much data you can store on your computer, but hard drive speed impacts your laptop's performance and hard drive power consumption affects battery life. Should you replace your laptop's hard drive with a Western Digital Scorpio drive? We took a close look at these drives to help you make a decision.

Why are we spending time reviewing notebook hard drives rather than just reviewing notebooks? Because the hard drive is one of the primary bottleneck components in every notebook. The hard drive hiding inside your laptop has to access the data needed to launch applications, store your files, open your files, and has to start and shutdown the operating system. A faster hard drive means a faster notebook. If you're happy with your current notebook but wish it was just a little bit faster, there's a good chance replacing the hard drive will make your laptop run faster.

So whether you just want the fastest notebook possible or want to improve the performance of your old laptop, a new hard drive might be just what you need.

The Western Digital Scorpio Blue series of 2.5-inch hard drives ($40-$100 street price based on capacity) are rated at 5400rpm with 8MB of cache and are intended for mobile devices that need high-capacity storage, fast and quiet performance, and low power consumption. These drives sacrifice the extreme speed of 7200rpm hard drives, but offer more storage capacity (up to 500GB) and less power consumption under load. Scorpio Blue drives come with a 3-year warranty.

The Western Digital Scorpio Black series of 2.5-inch hard drives ($50-$90 street price based on capacity) are rated at 7200rpm with 16MB of cache and are designed for notebooks that require the fastest possible hard drive performance. These drives sacrifice high capacity (only up to 320GB rather than 500GB) and consume more power in order to achieve the best possible performance. Some Scorpio Black drives (WDxxxxBJKT models only) are equipped with free-fall sensors that detect when the drive is falling and, in less than 200 milliseconds, parks the head to help prevent damage and data loss. Scorpio Black drives come with a 5-year warranty.

Both types of Scorpio notebook drives share much of the same technology, such as "WhisperDrive" for quieter operation and "ShockGuard" and "SecurePark" to protect the drive mechanics and data platter surfaces. We'll talk about these in more depth later on, but the point is that both these drives have features that make them excellent potential candidates for your next laptop hard drive.

Performance
When it comes to selecting a notebook hard drive there are generally just two things that most consumers have to decide: Do you want the fastest possible performance or the largest possible capacity? Generally speaking, 5400rpm drives are offered in higher capacities than 7200rpm drives, and 7200rpm drives have faster platter rotational speed meaning faster read/write performance.

The HDTune benchmark measures the overall performance of a drive in terms of transfer speeds (read/write), "access time" (the amount of time spent searching for data on the disk) and CPU usage (how hard your computer has to work in order to use the drive). The HDTune benchmark also measures the temperature being reported by the hard drive (more on that later). The images below show how the Western Digital Scorpio drives compare to other notebook storage solutions.

320GB WD Scorpio Black 7200rpm HDD	500GB WD Scorpio Blue 5400rpm HDD
320GB Toshiba MK3252GSX 5400rpm HDD	256GB Solidata SSD

Atto is one of the standard synthetic benchmarks we use to test the performance of a storage drive. Below you can see the average read and write times for the WD Scorpio Blue and Scorpio Black drives compared to a Toshiba 5400rpm notebook hard drive and a Solidata 256GB solid state drive (SSD).

320GB WD Scorpio Black 7200rpm HDD	500GB WD Scorpio Blue 5400rpm HDD
320GB Toshiba MK3252GSX 5400rpm HDD	256GB Solidata SSD

Clearly, the performance of the Solidata SSD far exceeds the WD hard drives with a read and write speed of approximately 80MB/sec versus 200MB/sec. (We'll have a full review of the Solidata SSD very soon.) However, both the Scorpio Blue and Scorpio Black drives offer larger storage capacities for significantly lower costs than the SSD. The other important thing to note in the benchmarks above is that both Western Digital drives perform faster than the Toshiba drive we used in the comparison.

Western Digital claims the Scorpio Black drive offers "desktop-class performance for notebook computers." We were more than a little skeptical of that claim and expected the Scorpio Black to benchmark just a little slower than a desktop hard drive rated at 7200rpm. In fact, while the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 desktop hard drive has significantly lower CPU utilization, the Scorpio Black has virtually the same average data transfer rate and access time as the desktop drive.

400GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Desktop HDD

Heat and Noise
Fast notebook hard drives are generally notorious for running hot and making "clicking" noise under serious use. Both the Scorpio Blue and the Scorpio Black proved to be a pleasant surprise in these categories.

Interestingly enough, the high speed 7200rpm Western Digital Scorpio Black drive remains remarkably cool at an operational temperature of just 30 to 33 degrees Celsius. By comparison, a Toshiba 320GB MK3252GSX 5400rpm notebook hard drive runs a full 12 to 19 degrees Celsius hotter at an average temperature of 42 to 49 degrees. A few dozen degrees might not sound like much, but since the maximum operational temperature of most notebook hard drives is between 55 and 60 degrees Celsius, we would rather use a hard drive that runs at 30 degrees than one that runs at 49 degrees.

In terms of operational noise, both the Scorpio Blue and Scorpio Black drives were noticeably quieter (26dBA to 29dBA) than the Seagate or Toshiba notebook drives we tested (30dBA to 34dBA). Both of the Scorpio drives feature Western Digital's "WhisperDrive" technology that uses an advanced seeking algorithm (IntelliSeek) to prevent the recording head from moving faster than needed and parks the head when not in use (SecurePark) to reduce both noise and power consumption ... which also improves battery life.

Impact on Battery Life
As mentioned above, the "WhisperDrive" technology helps extend battery life on the Scorpio drives. Our initial power consumption tests using a Thermaltake BlacX 2.5"/3.5" hard drive docking station enclosure with a DC power cord plugged into a P3 Kill A Watt to measure wattage indicated that both the Scorpio Blue and Scorpio Black drives consumed more than 4W under load. However, after careful testing of the drives in the enclosure with a multimeter (Thanks, John Ratsey) we determined that those initial findings were incorrect.

Our final multimeter readings show that the Western Digital Scrorpio Blue 500GB drive consumes up to 2.68W under full load and the 320GB Scorpio Black drive peaks at 3.32W under load. By comparison, the 320GB Toshiba MK3252GSX notebook drive consumes 3.51W under load. All the 2.5" hard drives in our test consume about 1 watt of power when idle and that is pretty much average for all notebook drives.

What does this mean in terms of battery life? Not much. But if you're trying to keep your laptop running on battery power for as long as possible then every watt matters. In practice, a few watts more or less in power consumption is only a matter of a few minutes of battery life ... but that's still a few minutes.

Conclusion
You might find it hard to get excited about notebook hard drives (horrible pun intended). However, a new hard drive could mean the difference between a old notebook that needs to be replaced and an old notebook that can be upgraded and used for another year or two. The latest SSDs on the market offer significantly faster read and write performance than traditional hard drives like the Western Digital Scorpio series, but these hard drives still offer the best "bang for the buck" for average consumers and businesses.

We were pleasantly surprised to see both the Western Digital Scorpio Blue and Scorpio Black drives benchmarked faster than their direct competition and ran cooler at the same time. That said, the "unpleasant" surprise is that the Scorpio Black wasn't much faster than the Scorpio Blue.

At the end of the day the WD Scorpio Blue and Scorpio Black drives are fantastic storage solutions for notebook users.

Pros:

• High capacities at affordable prices
• Both Scorpio Blue and Scorpio Black drives are fast
• Both Blue and Black drives are quiet and cool
• Lower than expected power consumption (after updated tests)

Cons:

• Scorpio Black drive not that much faster than Scorpio Blue

 

Awesome review. All the reasons why these are the only drives I use

I've benchmarked the WD Black drives against the Hitachi and Seagate 320GB 7200RPM laptop drives as well and it's still faster, it's only beaten by the SS drives.

Anyone know about the Seagate 500gb 7200rpm drive that just came out?

 

nice review...

 

i just grabbed a 500gb WD blue locally as i needed more space for my W90 and wow what a great drive for the $$ . I wanted a 500gb 72k but there always sold out online and didnt feel like waiting so this was a great alternative.

 

I use the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 as they tend to be the cheapest. My girlfriend and I both have the same laptop (X61s), but I put a 7200rpm drive in hers and it's far faster and far more responsive than mine, albeit slightly louder. 8 cell means she still gets 5 hours battery, never tested it with the 5400rpm drive though.

 

having a gaming notebook, I wont settle for less than 7200 rpm
and at about £60 for the 320gb Scorpio black, I am really enjoing the same performance, my 7200 rpm 200gb drive western digital that came with the machine, while having tons of space for a cheap price.... brilliant

 

How did you measure the power consumption? The results I measured for the WD5000BEVT as reported here showed a maximum power consumption of less than 3W, so I'm surprised by your 4.3W. I used a meter to measure the current used by the HDD in an external enclosure. Tom's Hardware measured 2.62W. The WD5000BEVT is the coolest of the 3 HDDs in your test and since the Watts get converted into heat, the temperature date suggests that the WD5000BEVT uses the least power.

BTW, the caption for the WD5000BEVT ATTO's result says 7200rpm. It should be 5400rpm.

John

 

I love it. I will soon be in the market for a new laptop drive. I may settle for the 500gb western digital blue. I'm having concerns whether it will perform ths same as a 320gb 7200 rpm..It seems there is no big difference between the 320gb 7200rpm and the 500gb 54oorpm. Nice!!

 

There is not really any notable difference between my 320 Seagate 7200(supposed to be among the fastest of the 320s ?) to the 500gig 54k drive .
The 320 now has my 3 OS installs on it and 160gigs of free space on the spare partition and the 500 is unpartitioned and just for games etc . Im very happy with the drive overall and i was very hesitant about buying a 54k drive at all , i have been of the mind set that its 7200 or nothing,but after reading all the reviews it was not hard to make the decision .

 

Thanks for catching the caption error, I corrected that.

As for the power consumption, that part of the test used a Thermaltake BlacX 2.5"/3.5" hard drive docking station with a DC power cord plugged into a P3 Kill A Watt to measure wattage.

It is possible that the Thermaltake HDD dock was sucking down some extra watts, but as far as I can tell the rest of my wattage measurements look right.

However, after doing some Google searching it is strange that my measurements for the Scorpio Blue and Black drives' power consumption in watts is higher than what you and others have seen. I will run some follow up tests to confirm my results. I'll post a follow-up here in the discussion thread (and update the article if needed).

 

John,

I just confirmed that the initial wattage readings were off ... thanks to your tireless insistence on questioning everything we write.

I thought we had taken into account the power consumption of the Thermaltake docking station, but using a trusty multimeter proved that the previous wattage readings were not accurate. Using a multimeter to get the amperage and voltage of the docking station with and without the drives and using some good old-fashioned math skills produced new wattage figures that are in line with both your figures and what Tom's Hardware is showing.

I also gave you props in the review. Thanks for calling me out when you doubt my findings. Rep points for you.

 

Well, the Blue 500 GB is also a generation newer than the Black 320 GB.

The black 320GB consists of two 160GB platters while the 500 GB Blue is made out of two 250GB platters. Heck, the 5400 rpm 250GB/platter disc is almost as fast as the 7200rpm 160GB/platter. Just wait till they make a 7200 rpm disc with a 250GB platter. That will be around 72/54*60=80 MB/s Average in HD-Tune.

I have the WD3200BEKT (320GB Black w/o free-fall sensor (not needed in ThinkPads) and it's a big upgrade from the standard 120GB 5400 HDD that was in my T61 (30 MB/s > 60 MB/s + accestime 40% lower). And since the HDD is the slowest part it really makes your laptop faster with anything that needs the HDD. Also, when copying files to my 160GB 5400rpm external drive my laptop doesn't lock up anymore (external harddrive not longer faster). And offcourse copying files over LAN goes twice as fast (Yes, I use GBit). A big bonus because I use my laptop to download (at night: nobody needs bandwith then + cheap energy) and transfer everything to my desktop on a later time.

 

I just bought a Hitachi 7K320 and haven't installed it yet, but I know want the 500 gb blue or the black. The review made it seem the hard drive was extremely quiet, which I liked.

The only reason why I bought the hitachi was because it was on sale. SHould I go for the WDs?

 

Stick with your Hitachi

 

We haven't done full tests with the Hitachi Travelstar 7K320 in our office, but a quick Google search shows that the Travelstar 7K320 sits in between the Scorpio Blue and Scorpio Black in terms of power consumption.

However, based on the benchmarks that other sites have done it looks like both the Scorpio Blue and Scorpio Black are faster in terms of read and write speeds than the Travelstar 7K320 ... but not by much.

A quick Google search didn't turn up any data about how loud the Travelstar 7K320 is, just some customer comments over on Newegg (some people claim it's very quiet, other people claim they can hear it making noise when the drive is under load).

We'll be reviewing one of the new Hitachi Travelstar 5Kseries drives soon, but as far as the 7K320 goes, it's a tough call.

If you already have the drive and it was a great price you might as well go ahead and keep it. If you didn't already have the drive I might suggest picking up one of the WDs ... but at this point you should should probably only pick up a WD if you can return the Travelstar for a full refund or find someone who will buy it from you.

 

Nice review, it was a good read. I thought the average transfer rate in HDTune for the 320GB 7200RPM would be higher, but I guess not.

I buy WD disk drives exclusively. I'm waiting for their 500GB 7200RPM Black drive to come out so I can upgrade the hard drive in my laptop (6% free space).

 

How long do you think it will be until that happens?

 

Got a 320 Scorpio Black a couple weeks ago, very nice HDD indeed, but put a dent in my wallet >:/

 

Well, the 500GB Scorpio Blue drives were announced back in September last year and slowly became available at retailers between September of 2008 and January 2009. Seagate also has their 500GB 7200rpm notebook drive on the market now.

Based on previous time-to-market, I suspect WD will announce a 500GB 7200rpm notebook drive by early Summer and we'll start seeing drives very soon thereafter.

Again, that's total speculation. I don't have any insider info on new HDD releases from WD.

 

Where do you guys think laptop HDDs are headed? Are we going to see 1TB 2.5 SATA drives? Or, is 500GB @ 7k rpm pretty much it.. esp. now with SSD on the horizon with unlimited capacity potential and continual increases in speed.

My last 2 laptops have had an SSD... the one in my 1.5 yr old TZ is a 32GB.. and the one in my Dell SXPS16 is a 256GB. It cost less to upgrade, its faster, and all this in less than 2 years. By 2011 we should have terabyte SSDs in the $400 range.

 

I replaced my tablet pc's HDD with the black WD 320gb 7200rpm. I also replaced my netbook with the 500gb since I will mostly use it for storing images/videos while I travel. I also loaded movies and music for entertainment.

 

I hope so. I really want an SSD but I just can't bring myself to spend that much on a hard drive when I can buy a Hitachi 7k320 for $60!!

 

yeah, me too. I really want an SSD. but with current price/capacity ratio, no thank you

 

Others have pretty much said it, but price is the biggest thing preventing people from buying SSDs right now. A few SSDs in the 60GB-128GB range have just started to come down into the price range where average consumers might buy them, but for the most part SSDs are still too expensive.

Also, when it comes to price there are two price tiers we have to watch: one for average consumers and the other for laptop manufacturers. What I mean by that is most average consumers won't buy an SSD and install it in their notebook on their own. We won't see a major shift from HDDs to SSDs in laptops until laptop manufacturers start putting SSDs into notebooks either as a cheap upgrade or as part of the base configuration.

That's going to take a while.

The other thing to consider is that SSD technology is still in its infancy. All of the bugs haven't been worked out yet and that has lead to some interesting problems around failure rates with various SSDs. In theory, SSDs should be more reliable than HDDs ... but in practice, not so much. In fact, we've seen more SSDs fail or show up "Dead On Arrival" in our lab than than all the HDD failures we've seen over the years.

Since we see more HDDs in our office than SSDs, the fact that we've seen more SSD failures/DOAs provides at least some anecdotal evidence that SSDs have a way to go before they're as reliable as they should be.

Still, the bottom line is that SSD technology has far more potential benefits for mobile computers than HDD technology. Every editor in our office believes that "eventually" SSDs will replace HDDs in notebooks. Heck, Western Digital just purchased the world's third largest SSD manufacturer and is going to start making WD-branded SSDs! When all of the major HDD manufacturers start putting money behind SSDs it's a sign that SSDs are probably going to take over within the next 10 years ... at least for notebooks. Desktops and servers will still benefit from the insane capacities of HDDs for a while longer.

 

Hitachi "merged" with Intel in SSD development too

 

Quite disappointed at the 7.2k drive HDTune benchmarks . . . . expected a little bit more than that, seriously . . . .

Anyway, great review, as usual!

 

Good to hear that the numbers now stack up better. I would like to think it is my engineering training which helps me to home in on dubious numbers.

John

 

Actually the older generation 5400rpm WD3200BEVT sipped up more juice than my current 7200rpm Hitachi 7K320-250.

 

really, how much?

 

If I recall, the older series of Scorpio drives consumed more than 4 watts ... which is why it didn't set off a red flag for me when our initial tests indicated power consumption exceeding 4 watts. Thankfully, the newer WD Scorpio drives seem to do a much better job with power consumption.

 

With the older drive, I couldn't get Notebook BatteryInfo to show me estimated battery runtimes over 4hrs. After cloning older WD`s data to the new Hitachi, I tried again - the battery theoretically could have lasted 4:15hrs. What does that mean? When idle, the Hitachi has better power management.
Whats better, I got the Hitachi as a warranty replacement (knowing the techs at Dell`s local ASP helps) to my old and rather hopeless 120GB Fujitsu MHW2120BJ 7200rpm drive. Even the 7200rpm old-gen Fujitsu had better power management but despite its rotational speed, it was left in the dust by the 5400rpm WD3200BEVT.

 

so Hitachi still better than WD ?

Any direct comparison between 2.5" 320GB 7200RPM Hitachi vs Seagate vs Samsung vs WD ?

 

Google that. I have found many comparisons. Althought their general conclusion was that the Seagate was the fastest. Not by much though.

I bought the seagate a while back but got rid of it because it kept making a consistent clicking noise.

 

Actually, I did found a review of them at Tomshardware about 2 months ago. But some veterans here told me that Tomshardware is not credible anymore. That's why I'm hoping for NBR internal review

 

I use both WD blue and black 320GB drives, but one in a Thinkpad and the other in a Mac, so cannot compare drive performance. I originally had the blue 5200rpm model and, impressed with the performance increase over the original drive in the Mac, was ready to buy a second one to upgrade the Thinkpad. However, I was persuaded by an online review (don't recall the publisher, unfortunately) of both drives and, while both scored nearly equal on normal read/write tests, the 7200rpm drive performed significantly faster while multitasking. It would be great to see a multitasking test included in future drive reviews to gauge performance under stress.

 

wow thanks for the great review, Ive been trying to decide between the blue and the black and now that I see the performance is so close im definitely buying the blue for the extra space

 

imo the wd are the best. seagate is okay but i have had numerous issues with the newest drives.. hitachi is nice also but i have not found that performance wise the wd's are all around the winner.

imo unless you want every last millisecond out of the drive the blue is the way to go. the black is a better driver but by hardly much at all. not worth it imo