Scorpio Blue 750GB HDD

WD has managed to offer the highest capacity hard drive, a whopping 750 GB,

in a 9.5 mm form factor with Scorpio Blue. In the past, manufacturers had to use

a three-platter design if they increased drive capacity. This unfortunately,

also increased the drive's height, so it wouldn't fit in a standard 9.5 mm bay

in notebooks. This WD Scorpio Blue 750GB is a standard 2.5” notebook drive

featuring 375 GB per platter areal density and uses Advanced Format technology

that increases media format efficiencies, thus supporting much greater storage

capacities. The drive's also frugal on power consumption; it draws a maximum of

1.6W, which drops to 0.65W when idle and 0.2W at sleep modes. The drive's

SecurePark feature parks the recording head off the disk surface more frequently

to reduce chances of damage caused by recording head touching against the

platters.

We tested the drive on AMD Phenom II X4 3.21 GHz based machine having 4 GB RAM. The WD Scorpio Blue 750GB clocked an average transfer

rate of 71.8 MB/sec with 18.7 ms access time on HD Tune benchmark. This speed is

faster than Hitachi Travelstar 5K500, which was also 5400RPM drive and had

clocked 54.2 MB/s average transfer speed and access time of 18.4ms

.

Bottomline: For mobile users who are seeking to upgrade their notebook's drive
to higher capacities, this drive is the ideal.