Western Digital has finally upped the total disk capacity of its Scorpio
Black Series from 320 GB spec to 500 GB keeping the traditional Scorpio Black
performance intact. The Scorpio series drives make use of the 'WhisperDrive'
technology for quieter operation and 'ShockGuard' and 'SecurePark' to protect
the drive mechanics and data platter surfaces. These technologies make these
drives apt for usage in laptops. The 7200 RPM HDD in the 2.5 inch form factor is
designed to deliver desktop class performance for laptops. Operating through the
SATA 3Gbps interface and with a drive cache of 16 MB, this drive consumes power
equivalent to a 5400 RPM drive which is a major plus for this drive. This is
achieved by the methodology utilized for seeking data by the drive. We tested
the drive using the HDTune benchmark. The drive was able to garner an average
transfer speed of about 80 MB/sec with an access time of 15.1 ms. These scores
compare well to the Seagate momentus XT hybrid Drive (reviewed in this issue) in
terms of average transfer speeds although the access times are not comparable.
The disk compares well with any other standard pure HDD available today . With a
cost per GB of Rs 9, this disk delivers competitive HDD performance at a good
price.
Price: Rs 4,500 ( 5-year warranty) |
Test Bed: Gigabyte P55A-UD7 motherboard , Intel Core i5 661 (3.33 GHz) Processor, 2GB (1800MHz) Patriot DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT graphic card, Windows 7 Ultimate . |
Bottomline: The drive delivers desktop class performance for laptops at
a decent price.
Shikhar Mohan Gupta