Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB Mobile Hard Drive Review

At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate and real-world applicable as possible. We list most of the steps and processes involved in setting up and conducting our benchmarking process below, but in the interests of brevity we can’t mention every last detail.

If there is any pertinent information that we’ve inadvertently omitted or you have any thoughts, suggestions, or critiques, then please feel free to email us or post directly in our forums. This site exists for readers like you and we value your input.

The tables below list the hardware used in our current storage-testing desktop PC and notebook, which remain unchanged throughout our testing.

Our Windows 7 Desktop for Mobile HDD Testing (Desktop PC; Wallpaper Credit)

Unlike the rest of the performance-testing we perform, using dedicated testbeds built around whatever product it is we’re benchmarking, most of our mobile HDD testing is performed on my personal PC. This isn’t something we’d usually do, but the same guidelines are adhered to.

The OS is tuned just as our benchmarking PCs are, and no unnecessary applications or services are run in the background during testing. The PC features specs that rid any chance of a bottleneck creeping in, and as with our other performance-testing, all tests are performed twice – or more if the first two runs differ to any important degree.

As part of our real-world testing, we both install Windows 7 to each drive and then test its cold boot performance. For this specific testing, we use the notebook platform listed in the table above. To assure that no bottlenecks existed there, we performed both tests using a Corsair F160 solid-state drive, which we also include the results for in our charts.

General Guidelines
• The Core i7-980X Extreme Edition processor is turbo-locked for result consistency.
• No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard’s BIOS.
• AHCI is enabled in the motherboard’s BIOS for best performance.
• Testing is performed using a SATA 3Gbit/s port tied to the X58 chipset.

Windows 7 Optimizations
• User Account Control (UAC) is disabled.
• The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs.
• Windows Update and OS power-saving settings are disabled.
• A full list of Windows services disabled can be seen here.

Our real-world testing consists of normal computer workloads, including Windows 7 installation and booting, file and folder transfers, music conversion, image manipulation and file archiving. For synthetic testing, we use a trio of proven industry benchmarks; Futuremark’s PCMark 7, Iometer 1.1.0 and HD Tune Pro 4.6.

As mentioned above, all tests are performed at least twice to assure accurate results. We’d like like to think we have such benchmarking down to a science, and methodically perform all tests the same way each time so that we can feel completely confident in our own results.