WD Scorpio Black 320GB SATA Hard Drive Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

With a 7200 RPM drive speed, 16 MB cache, and 3 GB/s SATA interface speed, the Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB hard drive looks impressive on paper and had solid performance numbers in the benchmarks. The performance benchmarks also showed that the Scorpio Black 320GB (WD3200BJKT) was faster than the Scorpio Blue 500GB (WD5000BEVT), which is no slouch. The Scorpio black series is faster than the blue series without a doubt. When compared to competing drives like the Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB hard drive, the WD Scorpio Black 320GB hard drive falls a bit short as it was found to have lower read and write speeds. The WD Scorpio Black 320GB hard drive did do better than the 7200.3 when it comes to access times though. When it comes to hard drives noise is also an issue, and the WD Scorpio Black is fairly quiet with an average acoustics rating of 25dBA at idle and 28dBA during a seek operation. This isn’t much louder than the 24dBA idle and 26dBA during seek mode on the WD Scorpio Blue. It should be pointed out that the free capacity of the Western Digital Scorpio Blue hard drive is actually 298GB as shown above and not the rated 320GB.

When it comes to pricing, the WD Scorpio Black 320GB Hard Drive had can be found online for $89.99 shipped today. That means you are paying $0.28 per Gigabyte, which isn’t too bad. For comparison sake the Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB notebook hard drive can be purchased online for just exactly the same price. In the end if you are stuck picking between the Seagate 7200.3 320GB and the WD Scorpio Black 320GB, you need to ask yourself which is more important: performance or warranty? The Seagate Momentus 7200.3 was the winner on the performance front, but when it comes to warranties the WD Scorpio Black carries a 5-year warranty compared to just a 3-year warranty on the 7200.3. You’ll have to flip the coin and make the decision on that one as it boils down to just that choice. The power consumption is even the same on both drives (seek power consumption is 2.1W on both brand drives), so these drives are really similar.

Capacity	No free-fall sensor	With free-fall sensor	Price
80GB	WD800BEKT	WD800BJKT	?
120GB	WD1200BEKT	WD1200BJKT	?
160GB	WD1600BEKT	WD1600BJKT	$66.98
250GB	WD2500BEKT	WD2500BJKT	$73.16
320GB	WD2500BEKT	WD3200BJKT	$89.99

If you are looking to expand your notebook’s storage capacity and want to get the most storage space you can get, the WD Scorpio Black series of hard drives will give you the most performance Western Digital has to offer.

Legit Bottom Line: The WD Scorpio Black 320GB notebook hard drive is slightly faster than the WD Scorpio Blue notebook series, but faces tough competition from competing brands.