WD Scorpio Blue 1TB Notebook Hard Drive Review

Free Capacity and Final Thoughts

Capacity

When it comes to storage capacity, the WD Scorpio Blue 1TB Notebook hard drive has a free capacity of 931GB as shown above.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The WD Scorpio Blue 1TB (WD10JPVT) is ideal for those looking to get the most storage capacity possible from a notebook hard drive. This drive is no performance slouch though as it was capable of delivering file transfer rates as high as 119 MB/s in tests like ATTO Disk Benchmark. That is flying for a 5400 RPM drive and performance numbers that are far greater than what you could get from 5400RPM drives in past years. The WD Scorpio Blue 1TB drive would make for a good primary drive and a killer secondary drive if you are lucky enough to own a laptop that has space for two drives. This drive is also ideal for compact NAS servers that use 2.5-inch laptop drives as you could get a 1TB RAID1 array in 2-bay devices.

When it comes to pricing the WD Scorpio Blue 1TB hard drive costs $127.00 shipped! This might sound like a bunch of money to some people, but that is under 13 cents per Gigabyte. The closest competitor to the WD Scorpio Blue is the Samsung Spinpoint M8 1TB, which has identical specifications (5400RPM, 8MB Cache, 2 x 500GB Platters, 3-year warranty) and costs $116.28 shipped. We don’t have this drive available in our lab for testing, but these are the only two 1TB consumer notebook drives on the market today. If you are wanting an SSD with a large storage capacity, you better start saving as the largest 2.5″ SSD is the Intel 320 Series 600GB drive and it costs $1,082.11 shipped or $1.80 per Gigabyte! As you can see there is a huge price difference and storage capacity difference between traditional hard drives and the newer Solid-State Drives. Hard drives are proven to be reliable and are very cost effect ways to store large amounts of data and will continue to be the leader here for many years to come.

When it comes to rotational storage drives like hard drives noise is always a concern with people, but the WD Scorpio Blue 1TB drive is very quiet with an average acoustics rating of
22dBA at idle and 25dBA during a seek operation. These are levels that are low enough to where we couldn’t hear the drive when in an enclosure. It also runs rather cool as when we we had it on the test bench the drive would idle at 27C and then peak around 34C during use.

The entire Western Digital Scorpio Blue notebook hard drive series comes with a 3-year warranty. Having a three year warranty is fairly standard for mainstream drives, so nothing is lacking on this front either.

At the end of the day the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB SATA 2.5″ laptop hard drive impressed us when it came to storage capacity and performance. If you want to get the most storage as possible for your notebook then a 1TB notebook drive is the drive for you. Just remember to backup that 1TB of data as if your laptop ever gets stolen or the data gets lost you have a backup!

Legit Bottom Line: The WD Scorpio Blue 1TB SATA notebook hard drive leads the way when it comes to storage capacity and does so with the standard 9.5mm form factor.