WD Scorpio Black 320GB SATA Hard Drive Review

HD Tach v3.0.4.0

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

Benchmark Results: The Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB Hard Drive isn’t nearly as fast as many of the Solid State Drive (SSD) models that we have recently looked at, but it is quick. The 320GB Scorpio Black averages 71.4MB/s read and 66.6MB/s write. The burst speed of this drive was a 246.9MB/s, which is right where it was expected to be.

Comparison Chart: To give you an idea of how this drive stacks up in the big picture, LR compared the Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB to six other drives to see how it does against other popular 2.5″ notebook hard drives. The Scorpio Black 320GB performed slightly slower than the Seagate Momentus 7200.3 in all the benchmarks except for the Random Access test. The results of HD Tach’s CPU utilization test don’t mean much as the application has a +/- 2% margin of error and the results of the benchmark range between 0-3%, which doesn’t represent a significant difference.