Customer Reviews

Western Digital WD Scorpio Black 750 GB SATA 3 GB/s 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Internal Bulk/OEM 2.5-Inch Mobile Hard Drive

5 star:		(79)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I have been a fan of WD for many years. Sure most companies go through periods when their products might not live up to expectations but WD has really stepped up their game.

I purchased this drive to replace a Momentus XT in my Macbook 15" Unibody 2010. I simply gave up with the bizarre behavior and constant firmware upgrades of the Momentus and went with this Scorpio Black released just days ago.

Much to my suprise, its pretty much as fast as the Momentus XT (when it was working correctly) except for boot. Since I am on a Mac, I really dont reboot much so its not an issue.

The 750GB capacity is stunning!! I have a 500GB Mac partition and a 250GB Windows Partition and I am pretty much set until SSDs drop in price.

This drive carries a 5 year warranty and WD has always supposed their warranty program well.

I am not noticing very much vibration in my Macbook but to be honest, I yanked the slow 5400rpm drive and replaced it with the Momentus as soon as I unboxed so I can not compare against the original drive.

Battery life has decreased slightly (30 mins) but given the speed of the drive and the performance increase, that is to be expected.

Remember if you are replacing in a Mac, do yourself a favor and invest in a quality set of percision screwdrivers as the screws are easily stripped and can often times be tight enough to strip inferior tools.

This is a perfect upgrade for your new Quad-Core Macbook Pro. Although Apple offers a 750GB drive option, it's not 7200rpm and that's a shame-their drive options limit an otherwise excellent machine. The speed of this drive in a new quad-core i7 15" Macbook Pro is astounding, and places this machine squarely at the desktop replacement level. It's quiet (as quiet as the stock 5400 rpm drive) and I can feel zero vibration. Battery life seems excellent, topping 7 hours with web surfing, MS Word, and less intensive applications that are not disk-intensive or use the discrete graphics.

Highly recommended.

This was my first time going WD for an internal HDD, and though I'd already had experience with their harddrives for small and portable externals - good experience I might add - I generally prefer Hitachi for internal hardware. That said, I am pleasantly surprised to find that this harddrive is a very smooth piece of hardware. Set-up was painless, the usual upgrading process was equally painless as far as the OS side goes, but what really has me the happiest is seeing how smoothly my computer seems to be operating. It's a bit on the weird side in that it actually feels better than my former 320GB Hitachi 7200rpm harddrive!

All in all, a good experience. I'll definitely keep my eye out for Western Digital internal harddrives in the future.

I purchased the Scorpio Black 750GB to upgrade the drive in my mid-2009 Macbook Pro 13", which was running the stock 160GB Seagate drive. From previous experience, I've found it wise to run diagnostics on a new drive before loading it up with important data. Western Digital provides a free tool for this purpose (altho annoyingly it only runs on Windows), so I ran the quick test (~2 minutes) and several iterations of the extended test (7 hours each). Pop it into an external enclosure and let it crank overnight; you'll feel a lot better about putting all your stuff on it.

For use as a bootable OSX drive, you need to format it as a GUID Partition. I used Disk Utility in OSX to do this step. I thought I could also use Disk Utility to clone the original drive, then shut the system down and swap in the new disk. Wrong!

Well, it sorta worked. It did boot up, but as others have reported here, the bootup time on the new disk was much longer than with the original disk: time from power-on to the Apple logo increased from 5 seconds to 40; total time to login screen went from 45 seconds to 1:35; shutdown time went from 4 seconds to 23.

After some research I found that the cause of long boot times is messed up disk permissions on OSX system files; Disk Utility has a First Aid capability for identifying and fixing this problem. Unfortunately, even after several iterations of repairing disk permissions, there were still many permissions errors and boot time was still long. At that point I gave up on the disk clone/swap method, and did what I should have done from the start: I did a fresh install of OSX on the new disk, then used Time Machine to restore all my applications, data, and settings to the new disk.

Now it works great. Bootup time to the login screen is now 29 seconds (down from 45 on the original Seagate drive). And noise and vibration is unnoticeable. Bottom line: the Scorpio is a great upgrade for MBPs, provided you use the proper method to transfer system files.

I have purchased three of these hard drives, and love them. As of this writing, this is the largest, fastest, standard height (9.5mm) internal laptop hard drive on the market. It is also quite inexpensive, and fairly quiet. Like all SATA internal hard drives, this is fairly easy to install and use.

Some technical background:

Almost all internal hard drives are either 2.5" (for laptop computers) or 3.5" (for desktop computers). Almost all laptop computers sold today and in the last couple of years use SATA hard drives, like this one. The three main features to look for in a laptop hard drive are: capacity, speed, and height.

All SATA laptops can accept standard height internal SATA hard drives, which are 9.5mm tall, like this one. Some laptops can also use hard drives that are 12.5mm tall. The 12.5mm tall laptop hard drives contain an extra platter inside, so they can have higher capacity than standard height 9.5mm hard drives. Many Mac laptops can use both the 9.5mm tall and the 12.5mm tall internal hard drives, so you have a choice. The Dell laptops that I am familiar with can only accept the standard height 9.5mm internal hard drives. This particular Scorpio Black hard drive is the standard 9.5mm tall, so it can be used in any laptop computer that uses SATA hard drives, which is almost every laptop computer sold today.

Hard drive speed is another consideration. Most hard drives rotate at either 7200 rpm (rotations per minute) or around 5200-5400 rpm. For performance, 7200 rpm is significantly faster. Applications like Adobe Premiere Pro for video editing specify that you should use a 7200 rpm drive (if possible) for best performance. If top performance is not a big consideration for you, or if you are mostly using the drive just as extra storage, 5400 rpm is perfectly fine. This particular drive is 7200 rpm, so it is very fast and is excellent for performance applications.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The fastest internal laptop hard drives of all are the fairly new solid-state drives (SSD drives). These "drives" are really just special persistent memory chips, put into an enclosure with a SATA interface so it looks just like an internal laptop SATA hard drive. As such, SSD SATA laptop drives can be used in any laptop computer that uses SATA internal drives (which is almost all laptops sold in the last couple of years). If you want super fast speed, look at SSD drives. They are amazingly fast, and look and act just like a normal hard drive. (Plus, SSD drives are whisper quiet, because they have no moving parts.) Your laptop will boot up in a flash and your applications that are hard disk intensive will zoom along, it's quite impressive. SSD drives are more expensive than traditional hard drives, but if you only need moderate amounts of hard disk space, look at the pricing on SSD drives, you might find that it is worth it for you.

OK, back to "normal" laptop hard drives. They have gotten so cheap, you may as well buy the highest-capacity, fastest drive you can that will fit in your laptop, so you can sort of "future proof" your laptop. As of this writing, this particular Western Digital Scorpio Black hard drive is tied with the highest-capacity (750GB), highest speed (7200 rpm), standard height (9.5mm) laptop (2.5") internal laptop hard drives on the market, and it only costs around $100 or so.

If you want even higher capacity, and your laptop can handle 12.5mm height drives, and you don't mind the drive being a little slower (5200 rpm), consider the Western Digital 1 TB Scorpio Blue SATA 3 Gb/s 5200 RPM 8 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Notebook Hard Drive - WD10TPVT drive, which has a full 1TB of capacity (33% more than the 750GB capacity of this Scorpio Black drive), and costs about the same as this Scorpio Black drive.

I just installed this on my Mid 2010 Macbook Pro 13". Just insert install DVD, swap hard drives, boot, erase, and restore from time machine. It couldn't get any easier. Everything is exactly like my old HD except I have 539gigs free. If it holds up I won't change my review, but I'm not very worried about the longevity. My old Hp had the 250gb Scorpio Black and it was still ticking after the computer died. It is slightly louder than the factory drive but you won't notice it if you don't actually look for it. I hope this helps someone else.

I have this installed on my ps3 and it works better than the hybrid drive i had installed. I needed the space after filling up a 250 drive and this has plenty of room.

i just installed this unit in a new macbook pro 15 inch i7 quad core (early 2011) to replace a 5400 rpm toshiba 500gb that came with the computer and couldn't be happier. it's identical to the stock drive in terms of noise (whisper quiet with my ear to the right front of the computer where the drive sits at night with no other sounds) and absolutely no vibration. i'm wondering if some of the reviews that note increase in noise are a result of a bad unit. it's noticeably quicker by a considerable margin than the stock drive, with apps (word, chrome, outlook, powerpoint, aperture, etc.) loading in snappy fashion. battery life hasn't changed (6-7 hours). i was originally thinking ssd but decided to hold off until prices fall, but now, probably going to wait 2-3 years when i'll be ready to upgrade the whole computer. great drive - can't beat the price, near silent operation, space, performance combination.

update: after using my mbp for a few days following the upgrade, i am noticing a slight drop in battery performance of about 10-15% vs. the mbp equipped with the original hard drive. well worth it for size and performance.

About half the reviews I saw in researching this said when they installed the drive into an Apple MBP, it pinwheeled like crazy. I was hoping it wouldn't do that for me, but sure enough...it locks up at every chance. It also whirrs some (not too loud, but more noticeable than my stock 5400 250GB), but the real issue is that it lags and locks up. No good. Gotta return it ASAP.

If you get this just know that if it locks up regularly--something that almost NEVER happened with my stock drive--you're not alone! SO not worth the extra space to get stalled every minute or two. :-/

I recently purchased this hard drive and a hdd enclosure for my ps3. I was upgrading from a 120gb drive 5400rpm. and after i installed the drive and returned my files to the drive, i will say the performance improvement was awesome. all my movies loaded faster, i had more room, GT5 loaded exceptionally fast, and the ps3 booted and shut down much faster than before. If you are thinking about upgrading your ps3's hdd for a reasonable price, this drive is the way to go.