Western Digital Scorpio Blue 640GB Review Discussion

Western Digital's Scorpio Blue line of notebook hard drives is one of the most popular series of drives on the market. This 640GB hard drive, the WD6400BEVT, represents a good value among laptop hard drives: It gives you the capacity and performance you need at a low price.

Read the full content of this Article: Western Digital Scorpio Blue 640GB Review

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Nice review, Phil. That's a slow drive indeed. It would be great for use as storage or as an external backup drive, but as a main drive . . . not a good choice.

 

As I was quite tempted by the 640GB I tried it out as my main system drive for a couple of days. When I was transferring some files from one partition to the other it was like the whole system froze.

After that experience I moved it into a 2.5" enclosure, now it's a nice external hard drive.

 

Beware of Western Digital's "intellipark" feature that are on the Scorpio Blue and Black drives and others. No matter what you setting you use, the drive completely ignores the OS and auto parks the heads every 8 seconds (or 4 depending) of being idle. Constant spin-ups and spin-downs during games or watching movies, and having games and movies constantly stutter because of it is quite aggravating. I've had that problem with my Scorpio Blue and there is no way to disable it. WD built that "feature" in their firmware claiming it conserves power, but many on the net are complaining that their drives have unusually high stop/start counts and their drives are prematurely failing because of it. Just beware if you are considering Western Digital.

 

Roger, I thought there are several ways to disable it, mentioned in this thread.

Are you saying they don't work?

 

As I mentioned in that thread I don't want to use third party software "solutions" to cover up a problem Western Digital has created. By default, any settings you set, in the OS, power manager, etc are completely ignored by the HDD and it will autopark after a few seconds. It does this over and over. That's why I asked in that thread for any recommendations on other brands as I'm looking for a new HDD. :\
I'm just saying in this thread that if anyone is considering Western Digital to be aware of this issue. It's also discussed over at the WD community quite a bit.

 

I'm among the unlucky schmucks with this as my main drive.
Thankfully, I kept the original 320GB WD Scorpio Blue in a 2.5" enclosure.
You're right about it being a slower drive, but for $100 in May, it was worth it IMO.

 

Weird, I have the WD3200BEVT (main drive) and WD10TPVT (external) and never noticed this intellipark feature affect movies or games...?

 

Nice review, just found this one.
Phil you somehow have to give a to link all your reviews in your profile.

Well, i have this drive running right now in my notebook.

The noiselevel is really good, and barely noticeable vibrations.
But the "clickings" are annoying and what more annoying is the fact that i have those freezes in games too.
I have to disable APM and AAM via QuietHDD to solve this problem.

Hm, the Scorpio Black shares the same features as the Blue...so this might also happen with the Black.

But what makes me wonder is that the Momentus XT consumes less power than the Black though.


As you have experienced all the mentioned drives,
how would you describe the jump in terms of noise (especially vibrations....) from the Blue 640GB to a Momentus XT?

 

I couldn't notice the presence of the WD 640GB, while it was easy to feel the XT. The vibration was quite distinctive in my DM3. Not really disturbing though.

 

Yeah, that's the other thing I've noticed: the 640GB Scorpio Blue is practically imperceptible in terms of sound, and generates less heat than any other hard drive I've known.

 

ROGER is right !
I got a new 5000BPVT scorpio blue, and I am very disappointed.
The hdd completely stops in under 16 sec., then it has to spin up again to read the next part of a file. And the worst thing is that the so-called idle timer can`t be disabled or tuned by WDIDLE3 program (the only means able to fix it for other wd series).
It`s made for MS-DOS by WD, thus difficult to get working on a modern PC.

The stop/start count is growing rapidly. I`m going to return it to the store, claiming that i was not informed about firmware defect that can not be repaired. I`ll ask them to give me xxxBEKT drive or seagate drive.
These drives also utilize 'advanced format'. Advanced format implementation by WD is faulty, because the drives report 512-byte sectors to the OS instead of 4k. Thus their partitions get unaligned and then the users suffer from bad performance.