Western Digital 640 GB 5400rpm SATA2 8 MB 2.5-Inch Notebook Hard Drive WD6400BEVT (Scorpio Blue)

by Western Digital

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 3.9 x 2.8 x 0.4 inches ; 4.2 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B002QAXZZY
• Item model number: WD6400BEVT
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 14, 2004

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

WD Scorpio Blue Hard Drives – Big capacity for portable computing.

WD Scorpio Blue 2.5-inch SATA hard drives deliver ultra-quiet operation and low power consumption, making them the ideal drive for everyday notebook computing. In addition, these hard drives are designed with ruggedness, reliability, and data-protection features that actively watch over your valuable data.

Why you should choose WD Scorpio Blue drives:

WD Scorpio Blue SATA drives are the perfect way to add storage for all your photos, videos and files on your notebook computer.

Low power consumption.
State-of-the-art seeking algorithms and advanced power management features ensure low power consumption and long battery life.

Quiet.
In a notebook drive, silence is golden. WD's exclusive WhisperDrive technology yields one of the quietest 2.5-inch hard drives on the market.

SATA 3 Gb/s interface.

The industry standard and most common interface.

Features at a glance 640 GB of notebook storage SATA 3 Gb/s interface 2-year limited warranty

Ideal for:

• Notebook computing
• Small form factor external enclosures
• Netbooks

Features:

SATA 3 Gb/s - The industry standard and most common interface.

NoTouch ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

Rugged - WD's ShockGuard technology protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks.

Tested for compatibility - We perform tests on hundreds of systems and a multitude of platforms in our FIT Lab and Mobile Compatibility Lab to give our customers confidence that our drives will work in their systems.

Upgrading your drive is easy - WD Acronis TrueImage, available as a free download on the WD Support site, enables you to copy all your data to a new drive so you don't have to reinstall your operating system to get all the benefits of a new drive. Note: Bare drive does not include any cables or mounting hardware.

The WD advantage - WD puts our products through extensive Functional Integrity Testing (F.I.T.) prior to any product launch. On average, each new product goes through 600,000 hours of testing. WD also has a detailed Knowledge Base with more than 1,000 helpful articles. You can also call toll-free support 7 days per week in the U.S. and Canada. See the WD Support site for full details.

WD-certified packaging - All WD drives purchased from Amazon.com are shipped in WD-certified hard drive packaging. It is designed and fully tested to provide WD products with the highest of safety while in transit. With WD-certified packaging, you can rest assured that your WD hard drive will arrive safely, fully protected, in a non-descript, easy-open package.

Compatibility
Works with Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000 and Mac operating systems.

You might also consider:

Internal Notebook Hard Drives Comparison Chart WD Scorpio Blue WD Scorpio Black Big capacity for portable computing. High performance for notebook computing.   Ideal for Notebook computers, netbooks and external enclosures. Notebook computers.   Capacity range 80 GB – 1 TB 160 GB – 750 GB   Interface SATA 3 Gb/s SATA 1.5 Gb/s PATA 100 MB/s SATA 3 Gb/s   Form factor 2.5-inch 2.5-inch   Cache 8 MB 16 MB   Limited warranty 2-year 5-year   Highest capacity     Highest performance     Photo/video editing

Product Description

WD Scorpio Blue 5400 RPM 2.5-inch SATA hard drives from Western Digital deliver lightning-fast and ultra-quiet performance hand-in-hand with low power consumption. In addition, they are designed with ruggedness, reliability, and data-protection features that actively watch over valuable data. Available in capacities from 160 to 640 GB, these drives feature a 3 Gb/s SATA interface and 8 MB cache. WD Scorpio Blue hard drives are designed for portable digital devices of all kinds, including notebook computers, external storage, and digital media players.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars High Capacity Upgrade for MacBook. Simple Self Install, December 2, 2009

By 

Glenn R. Howes (Nashua, NH) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

Short version: I installed this in my aluminum unibody MacBook. It works fine. I have oodles of free space. It's pretty quiet. At the time, I think it was the largest capacity 9.5mm tall notebook drive available.

Long version:
I didn't really want to upgrade my MacBook. I had plenty of room on the 500GB hard drive I had purchased just 6 months before, also a Western Digital Scorpio Blue, but something was wrong, and I didn't know what. My applications were stalling out after disk intensive operations. I tried re-installing OS X, rebuilding the Spotlight database, fixing permissions, everything and it still happened. So in desperation, I decided to upgrade my hard drive a little early, going up to this 640GB, even though it was the same brand that might have been failing me. And for whatever reason, it's worked reliably ever since.



Remember to de-authorize your iTunes account on the original drive before removing it, and do a final Time Machine backup (assuming you make Time Machine backups) before shutting down.

Anyone who remembers the pain of exchanging the hard drive out of a PowerBook G4 or even a white Intel MacBook, can appreciate the ease involved in swapping hard drives from the unibody line of Apple portables. A latch, 5 screws and an SATA cable are all that stand in your way. You will need a small Phillips head screwdriver and a T6 torx screwdriver. It literally takes 3 minutes to swap the drives. Then you can either rebuild from a Time Machine backup or from the original drive, assuming you have an external hard drive case or a USB to SATA adaptor.

This drive had too large a capacity for an external case I bought in 2008 which was rated up to 500GB. I had to put the old drive in the case to retrieve data, and the new drive in the MacBook to format it.

Remember that when you format a MacBook's boot drive with Disk Utility to make sure you are using the GUID option for your journaled HFS+ boot partition. That bit me once on an external drive and it took me 3 reformats to figure out what I was missing. Double and triple check that you are formatting the new drive and not the old drive!!!



I chose this drive because it was at the time the highest capacity 9.5mm tall notebook available. There are 12mm tall drives with higher capacity, but those will not fit comfortably in a MacBook. This drive is not going to make you jump around with joy, it stores your data, it's moderately fast for a 5400RPM drive, it is not noisy, and it's comparatively inexpensive. So it's a solid value.

And it prevents me from wasting my time looking for things to throw away. Have you ever spent half an hour throwing away old files to free up 20 cents worth of hard drive space? Our time is too valuable for that. Just get a bigger drive; they are cheap.

I hope this is my last disk base hard drive in my laptop. Solid state drives are rapidly dropping in price, and raising in capacity, and the speed advantage is game changing. Maybe this time next year, I'll make the move. Still this drive has the capacity to keep me going.

51 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Largest upgrade option for any PS3 and laptops that need 2.5"/9.5mm-height SATA HDDs, October 18, 2009

By 

A. Dent "Aragorn" (Minas Anor, GD) - See all my reviews
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QUICK EVALUATION

The Western Digital 640GB 2.5" SATA is a quiet, reliable, easy to install, drive.

The 2.5"/9.5mm SATAs easily and perfectly mount inside a PS3's or laptop's drive bay where they can replace the laptop's or the PS3's original 20-40-60-80-160GB drive or the new PS3 120GB SLIM's without voiding the warranty. Same should hold true for the upcoming PS3's 250GB model. The minor price difference between purchasing a 250GB Slim vs. upgrading an existing 120GB PS3 to 500GB or 640GB should make such an upgrade attractive to anyone who feels that 200-400GB of extra storage are needed.

At the time of this review, the 640GB does not offer the lowest cost per GB - that honor belongs to the 500GB model. I have little doubt that this is bound to change.



POSSIBLE USES

- Upgrade an existing laptop drive. I have upgraded mine from 60GB to a WD 500GB 2.5" SATA recently and I've been happy ever since.

- Upgrade a PS3. I have upgraded my PS3 from 60GB to a WD 320GB more than a year ago and I no longer worry about disk storage limitation. I helped a co-worker upgrade her brand-new 120GB Slim to THIS model about a week ago and it was quick, easy and uneventful - it helps starting with a brand-new PS3 to avoid backup/restore complications.

- Turn it into an external storage drive. It CAN be done by casing it inside an external enclosure and attach it to a computer and having it powered via an USB cable but why bother? Many vendors offer similar capacity external drives at better prices.

It should be noted that there is a bonus involved when upgrading a laptop or a PS3 to a larger HDD - the old drive. I do buy enclosures for those and I tend to use them as backup devices - redundant storage for photos, documents and so on.


MY RATING

I give this HDD its 5 stars for being the largest in it's class 2.5", 9.5mm form factor and for my happy history with WD drives - not one has failed me yet. WD and others do make larger, 1TB 2.5" SATA drives but those come in 12.5mm and will NOT fit inside a PS3 or most existing laptops.

____________________________________

Note:

For anyone new to this who considers upgrading a PS3 (easy) or a laptop (much harder because it involves possibly backup/restore and re-registering the OS with Microsoft), please note that the HDD does NOT look as intimidating as the picture shows. For some reasons, the marketing people decide to almost always show the 'naked' disk - which is the HDD with the enclosure removed. In reality, what you see in this picture is enclosed inside an air-tight, sealed, aluminum capsule and the only things you will be physically interacting are a couple of connectors and a few small screws.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great PS3 Upgrade Drive, October 26, 2009

By 

N. Weller (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

So far, so good with this giant upgrade for what used to be a 40 gig PS3. The upgrade, hardware wise, went off without any hitches. Popping out the original drive is a matter of having a philips head screwdriver handy, and there are no additional cables needed so this OEM drive worked fine. I cannot speak to its reliability yet since it's only been a few days, but there have been no perceived issues with the drive other than having a lot more space to work with.

A word of caution for those using external USB drives to back up the PS3:
I used a standard external USB hard drive to run the Backup application on my PS3, which worked as expected, backing up my mostly filled 40 GB original drive. After I installed the new drive, I was prompted to install the new Playstation OS to continue, and I used the same backup drive to provide the new OS file - DO NOT DO THIS! While this worked, when I walked through the setup, it managed to format my backup in addition to the new drive. Thankfully, I was able to still pop the original drive back in and run the backup again, so all I lost was some time. I would recommend using a separate USB drive for reinstalling the Playstation OS, the file at this point is under 150 megs so it would easily fit on the cheap USB flash drives many of us own. Keeping it away from the backup files would be the best until your PS3 is back up and running on the current OS, then reconnect and run the Backup app to restore your files.