Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVT

by Western Digital

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 3.9 x 2.8 x 0.4 inches ; 4.2 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B001JSSDGU
• Item model number: WD5000BEVT
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (820 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
  • #49 in Electronics > Computers & Add-Ons > Computer Components > Internal Hard Drives
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 2, 2008

Product Description

Capacity: 500 GB | Product Packaging: Amazon Frustration-Free

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 500 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

199 of 203 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Hard Drive for PS3 and Laptops, June 10, 2009

By 

NiteWalker - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Western Digital Scorpio Blue 400 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD4000BEVT (Personal Computers)

First of all, there used to be two product listings for this hard drive, both identical except for the ASIN numbers. One was listed as the stand alone, the other was listed in the Western Digital Scorpio Blue page with the pull-down menu that has all the different sized drives in the series. I have no idea what the difference is. Amazon, for some reason, took down the 500 GB listing from the pull-down menu and it now has it's own page. Odd they chose that direction. It would have made more sense to remove the individual listing.

Ok, this is for PS3 owners/upgraders. This drive fits the PS3 wonderfully and runs nice and cool with no issues. For the price you can't go wrong. I have the 40 GB PS3 (Spider Man 3 bundle) and have the data (saves + install) of about 10 games and I was running out of space. I did a lot of research of the various SATA 2.5" laptop hard drives available. I researched all the various brands and compared reviews and prices vs size. I came to the conclusion that a 500 GB drive for $100 is a steal given the extra space gained, so that's the direction I went. Of all the brands, the Western Digital Scorpio Blue series seemed to have the most positive reviews all over with the least amount of reviews stating drive failure, so that's the one I chose.

Installing was extremely easy after backing up my data. The longest part of the whole procedure was backing up and restoring the data. I won't go into details, but I do recommend the app another reviewer used to format an external drive larger than 32GB in the FAT32 file system. It's called "fat32format". It works extremely well and extremely fast (less than 4 seconds for a 120GB external drive). Just follow the directions and you're good. I did this because in order for the PS3 to recognize the external drive it has to be formatted in the FAT32 file system. As for the procedure of upgrading the PS3, just google "upgrade PS3 hard drive" and you'll get tons of tutorials and videos.

Now here's something important: A lot of people who upgraded their PS3's and saw xxx/465 GB free after upgrading are not realizing that this is not the fault of the PS3. You could put the same drive in a laptop and it will have the same 465GB. This is because manufacturers advertise a gigabyte as something different than what windows or the PS3 recognize. Manufacturers see a gigabyte (GB) as 1000 megabytes, and 1 megabyte (MB) as 1000 kilobytes (KB), when in actuality windows sees 1 MB as 1024 KB. So that's where the unaccounted lost space goes.

So as of now, my opinion is that this hard drive is a great choice for PS3 upgrades. If you don't want to drop a bill on the 500GB version they also have the Scorpio Blues in smaller sizes for reduced prices. I like this hard drive so much I may replace my laptop hard drive with one.

180 of 184 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great upgrade for the MacBook Aluminum..., January 16, 2009

By 

Juan Aguirre (Guatemala, Central America) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVT (Personal Computers)

I bought the new MacBook Aluminum (13" - Late 2008), with the 160GB hard drive, which quickly fell short to my storage demands. While on the market for an upgrade hard drive, I came across the WD 500GB Scorpio Blue and hesitant at first (I could not find anywhere a post which would guarantee that it would work with my MB), I decided to go for it. Upon receiving my hard drive, I ran the Time Machine on my MB, switched the OEM hard drive for this beauty (it took about 15 mins.), installed Leopard from the DVD that came with my MB, and then restored from the most recent TM backup (installing the OS took about 10 mins, and restoring the backup took about 2 hrs - it was a 140GB backup!). So far, I've had no problems whatsoever using the drive. It is very quiet, does not heat up excesively (comparable actually to the original hard drive), and now I have a MB with a 500GB drive!!!

I am extremely satisfied with this drive, and would definitely recomend it to any MB/MBPro owner who wants to upgrade the hard drive.

------------

Update: July 19th, 2010

I've been using this hard drive for over a year and a half now, without any problems whatsoever. Quite drive, no difference in power consumption, performs great! Actually, I am thinking about replacing it with the new 1TB Scorpio, especially because my digital movie collection is growing really fast (I'm ripping my own DVD's so I can view them in my LCD TV, my iPhone, my iPod or my MBP). Great drives, and to be honest, I've never heard of any freezing, beach balls, or any other problems before or after I bought my drive. Great product...still give it 5 stars!

121 of 128 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Joining the Choir - It's the Goodest, September 11, 2008

By 

A. Dent "Aragorn" (Minas Anor, GD) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Blue SATAII 5400RPM 2.5IN 8MB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive WD3200BEVT (Personal Computers)

PLUSES: It's large, quiet, fast. It easily and perfectly fits where a 20-40-60-80 GB, 2.5" SATA drive would, including in a PS3.

MINUSES: You may be able to find larger drives but not everyone may need more.

Of course, it's no longer 'the biggest' but I knew that a couple of months ago, when I upgraded my PS3. I also figured that, since I have no plans of storing a movie library, 320 GB would carry me for the next couple of years. After that, it's likely that I'd be buying the next generation game/multimedia machine.

Advice to the PS3 upgraders from someone who, after some hesitation, actually did it:
- Go for the highest capacity. If it's a 2.5" SATA and you can afford it you should probably go with it. I already replaced my original PS3 drive with a 320GB but my formerly 60GB laptop has a 500GB 2.5" WD SATA now.
- If you need to format this drive or any drive to Fat32, the best utility I found was FAT32FORMAT.EXE - Google 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.
- It helps to have a 60-80 USB-connected drive handy to backup your PS3 content before upgrading. With one of these as the backup device, the PS3 fully restore EVERYTHING, including whatever copywrited or protected objects, such as, in my case the PS2 memory cards emulations.
_______________________________________

Note (March 12, 2009)
The Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVT seems to be the way to go these days. I like WD and the 500GB is selling now for less than I paid for the 320GB. I actually helped a couple of friends upgrade with this drive and it was quick and easy.

Note 2: (April 8, 2009)
The review above was for the 320GB, which I used to upgrade my PS3. I just ordered the 500GB because life became almost unbearable with a 60GB on my laptop. I am planning to swap the drives without actually reinstalling the OS and the apps with help from Acronis True Image Home 2009 PC Backup & Recovery.

Note 3: (April 12, 2009) - 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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