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Top Customer Reviews
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Largest, fastest, standard height (9.5mm) laptop hard drive on the market
By
Randy Forgaard
on
July 10, 2011
Size: 320 GB
Verified Purchase
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 [[ASIN:B0034ZD5P0 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.
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I buy lots of these and this is not factory packaging and these have the same kind of aluminuzed foil like cover on them that de
By
kelly
on
December 23, 2016
Size: 500 GB
Style: 7200rpm
Verified Purchase
Less than thrilled with the obviously not new hdd's. I received hard drives that were previously installed and removed from new(assuming) computers. I buy lots of these and this is not factory packaging and these have the same kind of aluminuzed foil like cover on them that dell puts on their laptops when installed new. I wanted new hard drives with the newest firmware, not pulled(used) hard drives. Also notice the dom or date of manufacture....these are 2 drives from the same shipment one that is a pull from 2015 and the other is a pull from 2016. I expect Brand NEW in the box hard drives for this price!!
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A Good Drive With an Abnormally Short Life
By
Michael Maddox-france
on
June 15, 2015
Verified Purchase
When my laptop, a pretty old Compac nc8430 that I'd acquired at my university's raffle, had its hard drive start to fail in April of last year (2014), I was understandibly frightened. Thankfully, unlike when this happened with my desktop the year before, I did have a means of backing up my data, and somehow I was able to stretch that failing drive for roughly eight more months, backing up weekly all the way. On December 29th 2014, the drive, a Seagate Momentus 90GB 7200RPM HDD as it turned out, finally went kaput. On December 31st, I purchased the Seagate Momentus 320GB 7200RPM HDD. It cost me about $50, which was a fair amount of money on my current bootstrapped budget, but I'd read a LOT of good things about the drive's performance and longivity.
Unfortunately, I didn't get the full extent of its performance, I don't think, thanks to the SATA I tech that my laptoip employs, but I'll admit, I still enjoyed it. I didn't get speeds anywhere near 100mbps like I probably should've, given the research I'd done on the data transfer speed capabilities of a SATA I motherboards, but I did enjoy speeds still decidedly above average from other HDDs I'd used in my lifetime, a eraging between 35-50mbps for large files. Booting speeds were what would be expected using a HDD as oppposed to an SSD or an EMMC drive, but again, I didn't have unwarrented expectations, and was quite satisfied with the drive's perfoirmance overall.
Unforthately, this past weekend, the drive began to fail. What's more, unlike the previous drive, which was still able to stretch roughly eight (8) months before failing completely, this drive failed within three days. To my understanding, this is a new, unused drive (at least it said "new" when I purchased it, despite it being an OEM purchase). As mentioned prior, the previous drive that was in the computer when I acquired it at the raffle was also a Seagate Momentus, an older 90GB model. Truth be told, the drive's failure came at a frustratingly bad time. I have the data backed up, so that's not an issue. What IS an issue is the fact that it will be at least a month before the job I've acquired at the University I'd recently graduated from will actually begin, and then at least two more weeks before I earn my first paycheck. I literally do not have the money to purchase an additional drive at this time, and I currently need that laptop to fulfill some graphic design and photography projects for members of my church.
I know these Momentus drives can last much longer than they are; I've read as much. What's more, I have a trust for the Seagate brand that I don't for most other HDD brands. To my understanding, it's not uncommon for modern HDDs to begin to fail within three to five years, so the fact that this has happened twice in 1.5 years is concerning. I want to believe this to be some form of strange defective unit. I'm currently far past the timetable for returning the drive through Amazon. Forgive me if this sounds unfair or...shady(?), but is it possible I can return the unit to the manufacturer for a replacement unit?
I should stress again, this is a good drive. It delivers good performance that can't be matched by average 5400RPM drives, and it's priced at a good and affordable price. This is why I've priced the drive at three stars rather than two stars (if I HADN'T backed up the data, perhaps THEN I'd have rated it at two stars xD). I don't know if it's something with my laptop, if I managed a bad roll of having two defective drives (I suspect age to be the culprit for the first Momentus, TBH) or if I just have the touch of death (lol), but please don't let this review be a decision-maker to NOT get this drive. It's just strange that in my own hands, two of these things have gone out before two years are done...
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Excellent Hard Drive for PS3 and Laptops
By
MoogleMan
on
June 11, 2009
Size: 320 GB
Verified Purchase
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.
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