WD Scorpio Black 750GB Notebook 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.

Western Digital Scorpio Black 750GB:

Hitachi K5K500 320GB:

Benchmark Results: The WD Scorpio Black 750GB 7200RPM drive smoked the Hitachi 5K500 320GB 5400RPM hard drive that we used for comparison. The WD Scorpio Black 750GB drive had an average read speed of 105.7MB/s and an average read speed of 80.6MB/s! The Hitachi 5K500 320GB drive had an average read speed of 58.3MB/s and an average write speed of 56.1MB/s. The WD Scorpio Black also had an impressive burst speed of 237.2MB/s, which was far faster than the 133.1MB/s seen on the Hitachi drive.

If you have a 320GB 5400RPM hard drive in your notebook like many do, upgrading to a 7200RPM drive looks like a quick and easy way to get a quick performance improvement.