Customer Reviews

Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Black with Free Fall Sensor SATA 7200 RPM 2.5IN 16MB WD3200BJKT Bulk/OEM Hard Drive WD3200BJKT

5 star:		(57)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This review applies to model WD3200BJKT not Model: WD3200BEKT which does not have the free fall sensor

----

I purchased this drive to replace the 100gb, 7200 rpm Hitachi that came with my Dell Inspiron 9400. So far the drive has been equally as quiet, a little bit faster and of course much larger. I have noticed none of the vibration that a another reviewer noted. I have reinstalled Windows XP Pro on this hard drive at least five times in order to give the drive a good test copying and modifying files. So far this drive has passed every test with flying colors.

Pros:

Size - 320gb = lots of storage space.

Warranty - 5 year warranty (unheard of in a laptop hard drive)

WD's ShockGuard(tm) technology protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks during shipping and handling and in daily operation.

WD's SecurePark parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface resulting in improved long term reliability due to less head wear and improved shock tolerance.

Free-fall sensor - As an added layer of protection, if the drive (or the system it's in) is dropped while in use, WD's free-fall sensor detects that the drive is falling and, in less than 200 milliseconds, parks the head to help prevent damage and data loss.

16 MB cache

-----
In short, I am very impressed with this drive!

I was a bit skeptical about this drive after a lot of people were stating that it wasn't that much faster than the 250GB Seagate Momentus 5400.4. Anyway I followed my mind and I wasn't sorry, because this drive with it's 16MB cache 7200rpm was a step faster in the tests I ran using HD Tune Pro. I cannot attach the pictures but here are the results.

Transfer Rate Min/Max Average AccessTime BurstRate CPU

Seagate Momentus 26.7/63.6 MB/s 48.7 MB/s 16.3ms 85.7MB/s 5.6%

Western Digital 36.7/84.4 MB/s 61.9 MB/s 14.7ms 107.0MB/s 4.2%


These are the results I garnered with my laptop between the two drives and as you can see from the results the Western Digital Black Scorpio gives a nice boos to the system. My laptop is a Lenovo SL400, 3GB DDR2-800 RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26GHz 1066FSB, Bluetooth, Fingerprint Reader, Webcam, etc. If you are not able to spend big bucks on a SSD Drives, definitely get the Black Scorpio. It is definitely worth the money and the Free-Fall Sensor doesn't hurt either.

This WD Scorpio Black WD3200BJKT hard disk has been working great for several months now. I installed it in a Macally B-S250SU Hi-Speed eSATA/USB2.0 Storage Enclosure for 2.5inch SATA HDD to host several development virtual machines (VMs) containing application server and IDE. Being so small, and particularly in this very small enclosure, the free-fall sensor provides assurance in preventing damage to the disk in case of a bump or if moving it out of the way while running or accessing the disk. This kit runs of a single USB port without a single problem given the low voltage use of this disk during ramp-up. I would definitely recommend and purchase again.

The drive works great and is noticeably faster than the 5400 RPM drive that came with my MacBook Pro.

It runs pretty hot though, almost uncomfortably so. Wouldn't be good for actual use on your lap.

I'm not noticing any of the vibration mentioned in other reviews.

There are only a couple of components that are easily upgradable on the Apple MacBook (late 2008). If you are thinking about upgrading your OEM hard drive to a Western Digital Scorpio Black drive and need that extra little nudge to get you to go through with it, here it is. Do it! You won't regret it.

The two tools you will need for upgrading your Mac's HD are: a #00 Phillips head screwdriver and a T6 Torx screwdriver. The entire upgrade, including: removal of the old HD, installation of the new HD, install of OS X, and restoring the entire system from a Time Machine backup, took just over two hours (about two hours and 15 mintues). Don't be intimidated by the time it takes. The whole process was very straight forward. I did run into a bit of a snag while removing the mounting screws from the OEM drive. The screws are made of a soft metal and I ended up stripping one of them. But that was the only dramatic point in the upgrade. Without the mounting screw issue, I could have shaved 15 minutes or so off my time.

On to the hard drive's performance. The HD runs as quietly as the OEM MacBook drive, it is silent. I have not experienced any of the excessive vibration or heat issues other reviewers have mentioned. If anything, it feels like this drive might be running cooler than the OEM drive under heavy loads. OS boot time and application start ups are faster thanks to the 7200 RPM spindle speed.

The Western Digital Scorpio Black hard drive is definitely a worth while upgrade. Who couldn't use a larger, faster hard drive.

I bought this, intending to replace the HD in my late-2008 Macbook Pro. It installed easily and boy was it fast. Only problem was the excessive vibration. Seeks and other noises were minimal but the continuous 7200rpm vibration was a complete deal breaker. The Macbook Pro has rubber shock mounts for the HD internally and the supplied 5400rpm Hitachi drive has no vibrations whatsoever. With this drive installed the laptop could be heard to rattle on the surface of a wooden table. NO exaggeration!

I'm considering a return. However, I searched on the web and it is a very common complaint about this drive. For now, I'm using it in an external case where vibrations are still awful but only when I'm doing backups. I'm hoping to find a different brand with less vibration.

T.

Well lets see,

7200RPM
Sata 3.0GBPs interface in a notebook
320GB
16mb cache

This little beast is the next best thing to getting an SSD. I find SSDs premature because they are limited in writes and even though it is a large number, it will be easily filled within a year. This is placed in my HP dv7-1270us. It fits into the caddy perfectly without a problem. It came in antistatic wrap surrounded by bubble wrap to hold it. The FreeFall sensor is only available in the BJKT suffix in their Black line of notebook drives. The HP ProtectSmart inside my laptop is a gimmick.

The performance is very fast of course. Copying from the previous drive in eSATA mode got around 70-90MB/s write speed. Loads Windows 7 build 7100 within 25 seconds literally. This sped up my vLiting and other intense write speeds by at least making it 20 minutes quicker. The FreeFall sensor ACTUALLY works, not a marketing gimmick in other competing hard drives. I made it copy 7GB worth of ISOs just for the heck of it and when I purposely crouched myself and the laptop as if I was dropping it, the write on the screen paused after the 200ms and resumed within 2 seconds like normal. It won't quit out on you in the middle. Lets say you dropped the machine while you are copying large files, once your laptop is on the floor, the files will continue like normal without a hitch! Amazing!!! I have owned this for 2 months and it works great. Loading a library of 20,000+ songs encoded in FLAC takes no more than 5 seconds in Winamp. Loading the songs into the drive took about 45 minutes and 1 minute to add to the library in Winamp. This drive actually gave me 15 minutes more battery life than the stock Fujitsu in both idle and being used. HP ProtectSmart doesn't recognize this but who needs it when they got the SecurePark and the FreeFall sensors built in?

I've already submitted a 5 star rating for this product. However, my drive is now dead. The laptop dropped onto a thickly carpeted floor. There was no damage to any part of the laptop except the hard drive. If you are hoping the free fall sensor will protect you from data loss, forget it. The free fall sensor is completely useless in this thing, but other than that it's a great device.

However, since it's major feature upgrade IS the free fall sensor, it is an epic fail!

I've had my 80GB PS3 (Motorstorm bundle) for almost two years now and as every PS3 owner has come to expect, I began to run out of space on my standard hard drive. I decided it was time to get a new hard drive; something bigger and it wouldn't hurt for it to run faster too. So I looked around for a good hard disk drive and a friend recommended this one in particular.

As soon as the hard drive arrived, I backed up my data onto an external 500GB hard drive and began replacing the PS3's hard drive. Overall installation (not including the back-up and restore) took about 5-7 minutes. It was clean and simple.

After installing the new hard drive, I noticed installing games is a bit faster now (nothing significant, just noticeable). But the best part is knowing you can install games and download as many demos as you'd like without having to worry about space. Hard drive has been running fast and smooth for about 4 months now.

If you own a PS3 and need extra hard drive space, this is the one to get.

I bought this 320GB Scorpio WD Black 2.5" SATA HD to replace the stock 120GB HD in my 2009 MacMini.

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the contents of the 120 GB drive to this new drive and then did the swap.

The computer rebooted fine and so far it's been working great.