WD Scorpio Black 750GB Notebook Hard Drive Review

Free Capacity and Final Thoughts

Capacity

When it comes to storage capacity, the WD Scorpio Black 750GB Notebook hard drive has a free capacity of 698GB as shown above.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

With a 7200 RPM drive speed, 16 MB cache, and 3 GB/s SATA interface, the Western Digital Scorpio Black 750GB hard drive was found to be a very fast hard drive with respectable drive speeds. It won’t be able to keep up with Solid-State Drives, but good luck being able to find one that can match this capacity! The largest 2.5″ SSD is the Intel 320 Series 600GB drive and it costs $1,119.99 plus $5.99 shipping! That makes the WD Scorpio Black 750GB hard drive look like a steal at $104.98 shipped over at Newegg!

The WD Scorpio Black 750GB laptop hard drive is no slouch as we saw really impressive performance numbers that actually shocked us a bit. For example we saw 128MB/s read and 125MB/s write speeds in the CrystalDiskMark sequential read/write tests and these are great for any traditional hard drive. Just because notebook hard drives are only 2.5″ in size doesn’t mean that you can’t find good performance with them and the WD Scorpio Black is a great example of a drive series that is constantly at the top of its class.

Our real world testing turned out being fun to do as we were able to show the performance improvements that can be had on a popular retail notebook like the Sony VAIO Y Series. By doing this we were also able to show off the WD Advance Format software and show you how to properly use the free utility to align the WD Scorpio Black drive after cloning an older drives data to it. It’s always good to show the full potential of a drive on the test bench, but we always like doing some real world testing with an OS on the drive! We found up to a 47% performance gain by going from a 5400RPM drive to a 7200RPM drive by doing so, which is what we wanted to show you.

When it comes to traditional hard drives noise is also an issue, and the
WD Scorpio Black is fairly quiet with an average acoustics rating of
28dBA at idle and 28dBA during a seek operation. We were not able to hear the WD Scorpio Black 750GB hard drive when it was installed in the Sony VAIO Y series laptop over the cooling fans inside the notebook.

The entire Western Digital Scorpio Black notebook hard drive series comes with a 5-year warranty. Having a five year warranty is a very nice touch on a high-performance notebook drive like this. Most notebook drives only offer a three year warranty, so if you are shopping around for a notebook drive be sure to keep an eye on the warranty as well.

At the end of the day the Western Digital Scorpio Black 750GB 2.5″ laptop hard drive impressed us when it came to both pricing and performance. You can get some serious storage space and performance with this drive and at $105 shipped you don’t have to break the bank either. Just remember to backup that 750GB of data as if your laptop ever gets stolen or the data gets lost you have a backup!

Legit Bottom Line: If you want a traditional 7200RPM Notebook hard drive the WD Scorpio Black 750GB drive is the largest 7200 RPM drive offered by the company and uses 4KB storage sectors, meaning it’s using the latest in storage technology!