Performance Quick-Take With WD's 7200 RPM Scorpio Black 500GB Notebook Hard Drive

When it comes to notebook hard drives, it's hard to get enough of two things: capacity and speed. While SSDs (solid state drives) definitely address the speed issue, they only exacerbate the capacity issue (at least for now). Not to mention that the higher you bump the capacity with SSDs, particularly into the 256GB range, the cost skyrockets by a multiple of their standard spinning media-based counterparts. Don't get me wrong, there's an exploding market for SSDs, and they'll probably one day supplant rotary media entirely, but they're definitely not what notebook manufacturers are using for mainstream product development right now, or even in the near future. It is not practical for cost reasons alone. As a result, leading hard drive manufacturers such as Western Digital continue to push rotational storage technologies to improve both capacity and speed and lower cost structures.

We took a look at it not long ago Seagate Momentus XT notebook drive. This little speed demon combines both 4GB of solid-state storage and 500GB of traditional spinning media in the industry's first OS-agnostic "hybrid" SSD drive. It offered great performance, especially after the drive's caching algorithms optimized data usage on the drive, but so did its cost about 2X conventional notebook hard drives of similar capacity. So, as usual, there were compromises.

WD recently took the time to send us their fastest 7200 RPM 500GB notebook drive. I decided to take the opportunity to do a little A/B comparison of performance. The new 2.5-inch WD Scorpio Black 500 GB notebook hard drive is half the price ($76 at Amazon) of the Momentus XT, and as you'll see, it keeps up pretty well, even from a performance standpoint.

Looks just like any other 2.5" hard drive - WD's Scorpio Black 500 GB 7200 rpm

From left to right: WD Scorpio Black 500G, WD Scorpio Blue 750G, Seagate Momentus XT 500G Hybrid HD/SSD

ATTO tells us that the WD Scorpio Black drive is actually spotty faster when reading and writing small files, especially in terms of write performance. However, as we peak at 32K transfers and above, the drives are evenly matched, with the WD Scorpio Black being slightly faster on writes while the Seagate Momentus XT is slightly faster on reads.

WD Scorpio Black 500G HD speedometer results

If you go back through our Seagate article, you'll see that the Momentus XT and Scorpio Black are right at the top for average read and write speeds, according to HD Tach. Still, the Momentus XT has a sub-millisecond random access time when its solid-state storage comes into play, while the Scorpio Black clocks in at a more traditional HDD-like 14.8ms.

Finally, we ran PCMark Vantage's HDD performance module to test the drives under much more realistic conditions. Common standard access patterns for desktop usage scenarios and applications are trained in these tests.

The new WD Scorpio Black 500 GB drive ousted the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 desktop drive and the WD Scorpio Blue notebook drive in almost every test. It also offered better overall performance than Seagate's Momentus XT hybrid SSD/HDD combo compared to its first run performance, but after three conditioning runs for the Momentus XT, Seagate's new flash-infused notebook drive scored up to and sometimes twice as fast as any drive we've tested here. Remember, the Momentus XT is also twice the price of the WD Scorpio Black, but that's a fraction of the price of even the average 256GB SSD. Also, I'd like to note that in terms of performance, the Momentus XT is also a "tweener" compared to the average full-size SSD, which overall performs dramatically better in these tests.

Regardless, all things considered, if you're the type who sticks to tried, true, and economical standard rotary hard drives for your mobile computing needs, the WD Scorpio Black is one of the best performing 2.5-inch hard drives on the market right now. For a only about $76 you get 500GB of 7200RPM class storage for your notebook and that's a pretty good deal in my opinion Definitely give it an HH-recommended.Thanks for everything read and stopped by HotHardware.com on your web travels.

By: Performance Quick-Take With WD's 7200 RPM Scorpio Black 500GB Notebook Hard Drive