Customer Reviews

Western Digital Scorpio Blue 750 GB SATA 5400 RPM 8 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Notebook Hard Drive - WD7500BPVT

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The drive went in easily and is very nice in my new 13" MacBook Pro 2010 model. I had left time machine to copy all of my files while I went to work so it would be done when i got back. Upon returning home from work, everything appeared to be working great but I did start to notice a strange noise, after some use. It seems to be a known issue that when you replace the hard drive in the newer macs with EFI 1.6 or later, the drive will park the heads hundreds of times in a couple hours unless you install a fix for it. This can cause accelerated wear on the drive and shorten its lifespan. My drive had a load cycle count of 498 in the 7 hours that I left it on while i was at work, this is not a good thing; it should be at less than 10-20 for that same amount of time.

There is a very HIGHLY RECOMMENDED FIX at:[...]. It involves some minor technical work and can be compared to editing a few settings on the windows registry. If you can take the cover off of your laptop and install a new drive just fine, you can do this.

I have just installed the fix described above and everything is working great with no clicking noises coming from the new drive. Some other tips for installing the drive include:

1. Replace the back cover screws on the MBP unibody starting with the middle columns (in the order of bottom left, top right, bottom right, top left), next replace the end screws from right to left in the order of middle row, then bottom row, then top row.

2. If you are restoring from a time machine backup, do a fresh install of the software first by booting from the System Restore Disc, Going to the Utilities menu in the setup environment and formatting the disk using Disk Utility. Next do a clean install of Snow Leopard to take advantage of the new 4k sector scheme required for this drive. Finally on the first boot of the system, restore your files and settings using the "Restore from a time machine backup" option of the registration screens. Once the restoration process is complete, don't forget to run Software Update and the fix described above. That's it, enjoy your new drive!

Western Digital does it again! I just got a new PS3 Slim 2101a model and replaced its simple 120gb hdd with this massive 750gb hdd! Works like a charm!

It formatted to start with 620GB FREE of 698 GB / 750GB HDD

The PS3 will format your HDD no matter what your size HDD, but its all good! Game it up! = )

I previously had a great 320GB HDD Western Digital in my PS3 Phat 60GB launch system, which I am still keeping, but I upgraded to the new PS3 Slim and 750GB!!

This was a replacement drive for a 320GB 7400 RPM Seagate. A couple of things that will be important to others:
* The drive is silent, it is as quiet or quieter than the Seagate
* I cannot provide an exact measurement yet, but battery life is noticeably longer. I am estimating 10-15% even with the larger capacity. (Probably because of advances in technology as well as the lower 5400 RPM)
* The ADF formatting provides considerably more usable space. It is the first time in a decade where I am left with nearly the stated drive capacity after I have formatted the drive.
* Despite the lower RPM and smaller cache of the WD drive vs. the Seagate, I am not experiencing slower access, application start-up or data response.
* It fits easily into a 17" Unibody MacBook Pro. it is actually ever so slightly shorter
* If you are installing it in a Mac with SnowLeapard (10.6.x) and TimeMachine, you will want to install a fresh system and then import preferences, apps and data using the TimeMachine option. Trying to restore directly without installing a fresh system results in failure, I believe this is because of the new ADF formatting of the drive.

The Seagate 320GB was a quick reliable drive, but I filled it to capacity within a year.

I installed this into a slightly older MacBook and enjoyed the results. Significant upgrade from my previous 120 GB drive. One thing I found interesting is that it formats at the entire stated 750 GB capacity. I do not know if this is somehow related to a new encoding scheme used in the disk's firmware? According to my Mac this drive is 749.81 GB in size. Nice!

fit perfectly in both 13" and 17" 2010 MBP laptops. super easy swap.
used carbon copy cloner to clone old drive to new drive using external drive enclosure.
verify that the clone works by booting to it on the external drive - all good.
swap new 750GB into notebook internal position
reboot to internal drive
notebooks don't like it, do not recognize the new internal drive with valid OS installed

scratch head...

boot to another external HD with 10.6 running on it, leaving the new, but unusable drive inside the laptop
run disk utility, run "repair disk" on the unresponsive internal drive -

tada - fixed it

reboot to internal drive. all set.

no need for fresh installation onto this drive.
I'll report back if I have any troubles.

I have easily upgraded my internal hard drive in my MacBook Pro Unibody mid 2009 version. It's really easy to install. And yeah you will feel the power of having huge capacity hard drive; no more deleting stuffs! :) However just wanted to make aware of the total size of the hard drive will be only 698GB anyway you format, it will only be 698GB will not be exactly 750GB!

I just started using it so till now its working smooth will update my review if something came up after a while :)

Enjoy!
DJ

Updating review after using a week.

I have successfully installed and restored all my data and app. After that I started working on it and noticed that "Rainbow Spinning" comes very often even just viewing the pictures on iPhoto. And playing music on iTunes and if I do something more the music stops for sometime and play after few seconds back. Looks like my MacBook Pro didn't liked something about this hard drive. It's getting terribly slow processing. :( When I was using my original hard drive it was not like this it was very smooth and faster.

I am using Macbook Pro 15" Unibody mid 2009 2.53GHz processor 4GB RAM.

Could be me only but I am very much unhappy with this problem so I think I will do replacement of this hard drive and check again!

This is a really great upgrade for the Sony Playstation 3. I found the upgrade of my Sony Playstation 3 80 GB (PS2 backward compatible) to be quick and painless, once I had this drive. The Playstation (at firmware level 3.6) accepts the drive without any issues and the performance is as good as an original PS3 drive. PLEASE NOTE: Even putting in a SSD or 7200 RPM HDD does not speed up the Sony Playstation 3 hard drive access. The Sony PS3 system HDD speed limitation is not the drive.

Some notes about upgrading the Sony Playstation 3:

1) The drive bay for a PS3 is 9.5 mm tall. Originally, I purchased the 1 TB version of this drive based upon the specifications found on Amazon.com. The Amazon.com website says the 1 TB drive is 1/6 of an inch tall. In reality, it is 12.5 mm or around 7/16 to 1/2 inch tall. The drive bay is a good 3 mm smaller in size, so the 1 TB drive won't fit.

You should note, at the time I bought this drive the Amazon.com description / specification for this drive lists the height as 1/8 of an inch, which is NOT correct. This drive is 9.5mm tall according to my measurements, as well as the Western Digital product description page.

2) You will find instructions on the Internet (in multiple locations -- even the Sony Playstation forums) on how to upgrade the Sony Playstation 3 hard drive. Some useful pointers, though are:

A) Before backing up the system, make sure you're at the latest and greatest firmware level. OK, you don't need the latest, but you will need at least level 2.4 (as it contains updates for drives over 40 GB). I upgraded at level 3.6. NOTE: The operating system is not on the hard drive, but in the memory of the PS3.

B) Backing up the system requires a FAT32 formatted device. This can be a flash drive, an USB drive, etc. In my case, I tried an 16 GB flash drive, but the PS3 rejected it as being too small (by 1.4 GB). I used an USB drive (repartitioning it with a 32 GB partition and afterward removing the partition). The backup took about 90 minutes for 17-18 GB on an USB 2.0 drive. The restore took around 40 minutes, BTW.

NOTE: A back up from one PS3 user will backup the data on all the PS3 users. My Son and I share a PS3 and have separate user accounts. I as able to back up his game saves, etc using my account.

C) Should you want to backup your trophies, you'll need a Playstation Network account and the PSN will need to be up. I did my hard drive upgrade during the week plus long PSN outage. Fortunately, my Son said he didn't care about his trophies.

D) Physically changing the drive really is very easy! Once I got past the 1 TB drive size issue (with this drive), the upgrade took just a few minutes.

E) You'll need to format the new drive and then restore the data previously backed up from the original drive. In my case took about 1/3 of the time of the backup. Afterwards, the system came up just fine. I did verify the settings and can't remember if I needed to change anything back or not. I did need to go through the display prompts for 2D and 3D size again.

That's about it. I strongly suggest you Google for "Sony Playstation 3" "hard drive" upgrade and read up on it before performing the upgrade. These notes are simply my highlights and are NOT stand alone upgrade instructions!!

Again this is a wonderful drive for the Playstation 3! If you're wondering why a 750 GB drive for the Sony PS3, then I doubt you're using the most of your PS3 (or own a PS3). You can keep lots of movies, photos, music, etc on your PS3 in addition to downloaded movies, games, etc. In time, I'm going to hope 2+ TB drives are 9.5 mm or shorter.

I just put one of these into my MacBook Pro mid 2008 model that requires 9.5mm max height drive and it works perfectly. Went from 250MB to 750MB over night. I bought an enclosure for it (Acomdata USB 2.0 2.5-Inch SATA Hard Disk Enclosure HDEXXUP-240-BLK) and used it as an external drive first. With my old 250MB still inside of my MBP and my new 750MB connected as an external USB, I've used disk utility to format my 750MB drive first (Mac OS extended - Journaled). Then I used Disk Utility 'Restore' option to copy my old 250MB disc to my 750MB external disc (took about 7hrs for 230MB of data). After that, I restarted my MBP while holding down an option key. This allowed me to select the drive from which I wanted to boot up from. I selected my external 750MB drive to see if I can boot from it and to see if my new drive is an exact image of my old 250MB. I wanted to verify it, before I went into the next step of swapping my internal 250MB drive with this new 750MB one. As predicated, the 750MB external drive had a perfect image of my still internal 250MB drive.

The next step was to swap the drives. There are many videos out there that show you exactly how to do it, so the actual process of replacing the old drive with the new one was easy. The fist restart after the swap didn't go so well since the internal disk was not recognized. I had to use my Leopard installation disk to get to the disk utility again and run the 'verify disk" option (hold the option key while the Leopard DVD is in the CD/DVD drive and then after selecting "English" option, don't go through a full restart, just get to the utility option and select the "disk utility" from the top pull down menu). After disk verification, the disk indexing had to be updated, which you can accomplish by running 'repair disk' option within disk utilities. After that and another restart, everything worked perfectly.

I used the enclosure for my old 250MB drive and now I have a portable external drive as well. I connected it to the usb port on my time machine and I now have additional storage drive on my home network.

I purchased the 750G 2.5" drive to upgrade my Playstation 3 Hard Drive so that I can store more home videos. The upgrade did not encounter any problem. Please note that Western Digital also has a 1TB 2.5" drive, but it is 2 mm thicker than the standard 2.5" drive and will not fit in the PS3 Hard Drive slot. The 750G hard drive fits into PS3 just fine.

I installed the WD7500BPVT in my mid-2009 13" MacBook Pro model 5,5.

This drive has the capacity I need for my ever-increasing music collection of over 16,000 songs encoded in the Apple Lossless format.

The drive is relatively quiet -- just slightly more audible than my MacBook Pro's original Hitachi 5K500 160GB drive, which is nearly silent.

I use SMARTReporter to check the drive's attributes. I found that the Load Cycle Count was increasing at about 100/hour, so I installed Lingon and hdapm to solve the issue.

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