WD Scorpio Blue 500GB Notebook Hard Drive

A 500GB Notebook Hard Drive!

With the notebook market growing faster than the desktop market, many consumers are finding that they don’t have enough available storage space as they have filled up the drive rather quickly. If you fall into that category and are looking for a massive hard drive for your notebook, a 500GB hard drive is as big as you can go right now. With a 500GB hard drive you can store the following:

• Up to 142,000 6MP digital photos
• Up to 125,000 4min long 128 kbps songs (MP3)
• Up to 12,000 4 min long songs (uncompressed CD quality)
• Up to 38 hours of Digital Video (DV) at 13 GB/hr
• Up to 220 hours of DVD quality video at 2.25 GB/hr
• Up to 60 hours of HD video at 8.3 GB/hr

On Sunday I published a review on the Seagate Momentus 7200.2 200GB notebook hard drive and found that it offered decent bang for the buck. Today, I’ll be looking at a drive that costs nearly twice the price, but offers more than twice the storage space: the 500GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue hard drive. With a 5400 RPM drive speed, 12 ms access time, and up to 3 GB/s SATA interface speed, the 500GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue hard drive looks impressive on paper. When it comes to pricing, the WD Scorpio Blue 500GB Hard Drive retails online for $99.99, which makes it $0.20 per Gigabyte. For comparison sake the Seagate Momentus 7200.2 200GB notebook hard drive can be purchased online for just $54.99 plus shipping, which comes out being $0.27 per Gigabyte. That means that while the WD Scorpio Blue 500GB costs more, you are actually pay less per Gigabyte.

The WD Scorpio Blue 500GB is sold under the part number WD5000BEVT, and is obviously part of the Blue series. WD has color coded their products, which makes is easy to see who they are aimed at. Their mainstream products are called Blue, power-efficient drives are named Green, and high-performance drives are called Black. All of the WD Blue drives spin at 5,400 RPM, utilize a SATA/300 interface with Native Command Queuing (NCQ) support, and have 8 MB of cache memory. Those wanting a little more performance should look at the Scorpio Black as it has a 7,200 RPM drive speed and 16 MB of cache memory, but it only comes in capacities up to 320GB. If you want more storage space you’ll need to sacrifice a little performance!

Hard Drive Features:

• Form Factor: 2.5″ x 1/8H
• Capacity: 500 GB
• Interface Type: Serial ATA-300
• Buffer Size: 8 MB
• Features: Native Command Queuing (NCQ)
• Seek Time: 12.0 ms (average)
• Average Latency: 5.50 ms
• Spindle Speed: 5400 RPM
• Manufacturer Warranty: 3 year limited warranty

The WD Scorpio Blue 500GB uses two 250GB platters to reach the full capacity rating of the drive, which is impressive. What is also impressive is the 12.0 ms average seek time! The back of this 2.5″ notebook hard drive is pictured above and gives a better look at the SATA power connector and the SATA NCQ interface.

The WD Scorpio Blue 500GB drive is power efficient since it has a 5400 RPM drive speed. At idle the WD5000BEVT consumes 0.85 Watts, and when under full load doing read/write the drive consumes 2.50 Watts. These are very good power consumption numbers, so moving to a 500GB hard drive shouldn’t impact battery life as the power consumption numbers are in the same ball park as much smaller drives.

Now that we know the basics on the WD Scorpio Blue 500GB hard drive, let’s move on to the benchmarks!