Customer Reviews

Western Digital 500GB Scorpio Blue Sata 5400RPM 8MB Internal Laptop Hard Drive - Retail

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

QUICK EVALUATION AND RATING:

The Western Digital 500GB 2.5" SATA II is a quiet, fast, easy to install, drive. Based on my experience with WD (I own several), the Scorpios are reliable drives. The 2.5" 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 and the new PS3 120GM SLIM's without voiding the warranty.

I have this exact model running inside my laptop as I am writing this review. The upgrade was relatively easy and it's been working well for the past several months. I can't think of any flaws and the price is right so the 500GB Scorpio Blue earns its 5 stars.

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Laptop Upgrade:

My 2 year old Thinkpad T60 came with a wimpy 60GB SATA drive. I needed the ability to upgrade to the much larger 500GB and do it without having to reinstall the OS, apply the service packs and then reinstall and configure 100 different little apps.

Acronis True Image Home 2009 PC Backup & Recovery allowed me to do all of the above in about one hour. Its Utilities section has a 'clone' option that would copy EVERYTHING, including the Master Boot Record/Sector (MBR) from the puny 60GB drive unto the 500GB while allowing me to control the size of the active partition - this while the 500GB was connected through a USB wire and the laptop booted off the program's CD.

Once the operation completed (50 minutes) I simply removed the old 60GB drive off my laptop and replaced it with the 500GB drive. Once the laptop was turned back on it booted up happily, with a 200GB master partition and a 300GB second partition. There are 3 words that I have to use to describe the process: PERFECTION and COMPLETE SATISFACTION. This capability alone is worth the price of this product.

To my surprise, with the new drive, the Primary Hard Disk score as computed by Microsoft (right click on 'My computer' then select 'Properties') jumped from a decent 4.8 to an unexpected 5.7.

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PS3 Upgrade:

I have replaced my original PS3 drive with a 320 GB WD quite a while ago but, over the last weekend, I helped a friend of mine upgrade his PS3's with this one. He decided to pick this model and, since I had a great experience with the 320GB version, I encouraged him to go WD.

My friend believes that the 500GB is at the peak of price/performance curve at this time. Like me, he has no plans of storing a movie library on the PS3 so he expects for the 500GB to be sufficient for the life of his console. After that, it's likely that he'll be buying the next generation game/multimedia machine. The 320 GB model that I used some time ago is still available but the 500 GB is only $30 more so it makes a lot of sense to spend a little more and enjoy the extra storage.

Advice to the PS3 upgraders from someone who, after some hesitation, actually did it and then did it again a few more times for friends and family since:

- If you need to format this drive or any drive to FAT32 - and you need a FAT32 partition for the PS3 backup - the best utility I found [...] - Google it and you shall find it out there. I'm not reviewing the formatter utility but I can tell you that it does a drive in less than 10 seconds AND it works on Vista too.
- It helps to have a USB-connected drive handy to back up your PS3 content before upgrading. With one of these as the backup device, the PS3 fully restores EVERYTHING, including whatever copywrited or protected objects, such as, in my case the PS2 memory cards emulations and all the game saves.

I will not go into upgrade details because there are lots of guides on the Net including great Youtube videos on how to do it but, if anyone has any questions, do leave a note and I shall reply as soon as I get to read it.

To conclude, the upgrade proceeded without any glitches and my friend has now a perfectly working console where storage won't be an issue for some time to come. PS3 performance appears to the same, which is how it should be. I haven't heard back from my friend in 8 days now so, my assumption is that all is working well and he's busy enjoying his upgraded PS3.

I used this HD to change the original drive from my MacBook. It worked well, its quiet. Its been a couple of weeks only so cant say if will hold well.

My MacBook Pro spends most of the time on a stand on the desk in my quiet home office. I installed the drive and while I'm quite happy with its speed of operation, I don't like the noises it makes when idle. This wouldn't be an issue in noisier environments like shared offices or cafes, so if that's where you'd be using it, have no qualms about buying it. As for me, I hope to replace it with something quieter and then move it to an external enclosure for use in periodic backups.

I upgraded my ps3 with this drive and it was a breeze. It only took me 5 minutes to get this drive working on my ps3 and I am transferring all my movies and music from my external drive to it.

I finished upgrading a PS3 slim last night using this drive. Worked quite well. If I had it to do over again I would probably upgrade the drive before I started using the PS3 but no biggie... I also got an enclosure to turn the old 120GB drive into an external USB drive when I'm done. I used my main Ubuntu machine to format the 500GB drive to FAT32 after putting it in the external enclosure and used the PS3 backup utility to copy everything from the PS3 to the new 500GB drive. I then hooked the 500GB drive to my Ubuntu box and copied the PS3 folder from it to the computer so I could install the 500GB drive in the PS3 and reformat it. After installing the 500GB drive in the PS3 I let the PS3 reformat it. I also put the old 120GB drive in the external enclosure so I could use it as a USB drive and reformatted it for use with FAT32. I then downloaded the latest system software from the playstation site and copied it to the right spot on the external drive so the basic system software for the PS3 could be reloaded. After that was completed I copied the backup file(s) from my computer to the external drive so the PS3 could restore all the data. Kind of convoluted - would have been easier if I had an extra external drive laying around... Took about 2 1/2 hrs to back up the PS3 data. About 30-45min to copy the backup to my computer. Another 30-45 min to copy the backup from my computer to the old drive after converting it to an external. Then another 2 1/2 hrs for the PS3 to restore all the data. Now I'm wondering what I'm going to do with all that "extra" drive space...

Upgrading my 40GB PS3 to 500GB was super easy and seamless. It literally took less than 5 minutes to replace. The formatting and recovery of old files was what took the longest. Also, my PS3 has been quieter since. I would totally recommend the upgrade!

This is probably a great product, but I can only tell you that it does not work in the Infosafe Startech (SAT2510U2E) external enclosure. I've tried two new drives in the Infosafe enclosure with several different laptops with both MS Vista and Windows-7 but get an error message while the laptop is searching for the driver.

I bought this drive specifically to upgrade my first gen 60GB PS3. I backed up my 60GB data using the PS3's built in backup utility to a usb drive, then removed the old drive, put in the Scorpio Blue 500GB. Formatted, restored my data and everything works fine. I wasn't so lucky when I tried using a Seagate monumentous drive of the same size. So I can whole heartedly recommend this drive for use in a PS3. I'm certain it would work great for all other applications too. Great Drive.

the install was very simple & copy my data from my old drive was easy with WD's Acronis software. Will be adding 2nd drive soon.

I've had this hard drive for maybe about 2 months now, and it's been awesome so far. Easy installation, quiet and quick.

If you are a mac user, remember that you need to reformat it before it will work with your computer.

Also note that it is only actually like 460 gigs - for some reason they just tell you its 500.