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 l...