Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB Mobile Hard Drive Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] For notebook users, "size matters". We're not only talking about density here, but also physical size. Having the best of both worlds just hasn't been an option for most people, because when a top-tier model gets released to the market, offering unparalleled densities, it'll almost always feature a 12.5mm height, which most notebooks don't support. I have little doubt that when Western Digital unveiled its first 1TB mobile drive back in July of 2009, many shrugged at its 12.5mm requirement. Rinse and repeat when the company followed-up with an 'Advanced Format' variant this past January. For those with excellent patience thresholds, though, the wait for your 9.5mm 1TB hard drive is finally over. With its WD10JPVT, Western Digital finally delivers a 1TB mobile offering that most people can take advantage of, while at the same time improving both power efficiency and shock resistance. WD pulled this drive off by implementing two 500GB platters under the hood, which until last week (Toshiba press release PDF) was the areal density leader for mobile drives. In a match-up between the 9.5mm WD10JPVT and 12.5mm WD10TPVT, WD's latest drive increases the shock resistance from 350Gs to 400Gs, and decreases active power consumption from 1.7W to 1.4W - a minor, but appreciated decrease. In addition to those improvements, Western Digital touts some other features unique to its drives that it points out in its press release (its competitors have similar technologies). 'Shock Tolerant' is one, tied to the fact that this drive boasts the best shock-protection on the market. 'Advanced Format' is another. Drives with "PVT" in their model name support this, and in essence means that the drive uses 4,096 byte sector sizes rather than 512 byte, for the most part improving the read/write/copy throughput speeds of larger files. Cool, quiet and reliability are three factors that we'd hope any hard drive vendor would stress in developing their respective product, and Western Digital claims that both its 'WhisperDrive' and 'SecurePark' technologies will keep the drive quiet while also ensuring it has a long life ahead of it. Another thing that WD states sets it apart from the rest is its FIT Lab, which we first learned about last year with the company's launch of its SiliconBlue SSDs. In this lab, WD performs tests on hundreds of drives and systems to ensure absolute quality when the product leaves its door and reaches yours. Currently, WD offers two classes of Scorpio mobile drives, Black and Blue; the former targeted at the high-end/enthusiast user; the latter for everyone else. Competition-wise, the Scorpio Blue series could be best compared to Seagate's Momentus LP, which offers the same general performance claims overall. Density-wise, WD offers the much larger drives, as Seagate currently only offers up to 640GB for its Momentus LP series. Drive Features Scorpio Blue Scorpio Black Capacity 80GB~1TB 160GB~750GB Interface SATA 3Gbit/s SATA 1.5Gbit/s PATA 133MB/s SATA 3Gbit/s Form Factor 2.5" 9.5mm~12.5mm Height 2.5" 9.5mm Height Rotational Speed 5400RPM 7200RPM Cache 8MB 16MB Read Latency (500GB Model) 5.50ms 4.20ms Throughput (500GB Model) ~136MB/s ~160MB/s Cache 8MB 16MB Acoustics 22dBA Idle 25dBA Active 28dBA Idle 28dBA Active Power Consumption 0.65W Idle 1.60W Active 0.8W Idle 1.75W Active Limited Warranty 3 Years 5 Years From this table, it becomes clear that the Scorpio Black drives would be preferred over the Blue for the sake of raw performance, but currently there doesn't exist a 1TB option in that series - even at 12.5mm. In addition, as the Blue series offers better power consumption and acoustics, it might actually be preferred by some. Western Digital's latest 1TB drive may have one thing working in its favor, though. As its areal density is greater than that of the 750GB Black we'll be testing (500GB per platter vs. 375GB), we could well see both drives match up in some tests. As this is the first mobile hard drive review we've done in quite a while, we're starting from scratch and introducing a more recent methodology. We'll be receiving more mobile drives in the near future so that we can built up our test database as we do with much of our other content. That's said, let's take a quick look at our test system and benchmarking suite, then get straight into some results! [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology][Top Ad] 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. Component Mobile HDD Test System - Desktop Processor Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition (3.33GHz Six-Core) Motherboard GIGABYTE X58A-UD5 Memory 12GB Kingston DDR3-1600 Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Audio ASUS Xonar Essence STX Storage Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB (WD10JPVT) Western Digital Scorpio Blue 750GB (WD7500BPVT) Western Digital Scorpio Black 750GB (WD7500BPKT) Power Supply Corsair HX1000 Cooling Corsair H60 Liquid-Cooled Et cetera Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit Our Windows 7 Desktop for Mobile HDD Testing (Desktop PC; Wallpaper Credit) Component Mobile HDD Test System - Notebook Model Gateway UC7807u Processor Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 2.0GHz Chipset Intel Cantiga GM45 Graphics Intel 4500MHD Display 13.3" Chi Mei N133I7-L01 Memory 3GB DDR2-667 5-5-5-15: Samsung M4 70T5663QZ3-CE6 (2GB) Hynix HYMP112S64CP6-Y5 (1GB) Hard Drive (Same as above.) ODD Optiarc AD-7640S Slot-Loader Audio Intel 82801IB (HDMI) Realtek ALC663 Network Intel WiFi Link 5100 AGN (a/g/n) Realtek RTL8101E LAN 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. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Real-World: File & Folder Transfers; 7-Zip Archiving][Top Ad] To kick off our mobile HDD benching suite, we'll start with what we consider to be one of the more important tests; real-world transfer speeds. Transferring files and folders on our PCs is about as common as using the PC in itself, so when one hard drive offers better performance than another in this regard, it's hard to ignore. For the sake of effectiveness, we use two separate sources for our transfer, both being 20GB in size. The first is a solid file, weighing in at 21,561,357,519 bytes. The second is a folder, containing 4,012 hand-picked files (500 MP3, 1,000 photo, 2,500 documents and 12 videos), weighing in at 21,565,118,587 bytes. To calculate the throughput rate of each transfer, we begin our stopwatch at soon as we click "Paste" in our right-click menu, and once complete, we divide the total size of the 'source in bytes' by the 'time required in seconds' by '1,048,576 bytes' (eg: 21,565,118.587 / 250 seconds / 1,048,576 = 82.26 MB/s). We've opted to provide MB/s results in lieu of 'seconds taken' as we feel it's easier to comprehend and is more useful overall. Thanks to its areal density boost, the 1TB Blue performs much better than the 750GB Blue in these tests, despite offering the exact same seek times and rotational speeds. 7-Zip Archiving. File and folder transfers are a given for those who use their computers for more than just e-mail, but for some, file archiving is just as common. Be it to save space or to backup a lot of files into a single one, archiving can be as storage-intensive as it is convenient. To give our drives a proper test, we've created a 772MB folder filled with 39,236 highly compressible files, and once compressed...

Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB Mobile Hard Drive Review

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Rob Williams