Western Digital Scorpo Black 750gb laptop hard drive

Conclusion

This thing really is a monster.  In summary, it blows the socks off our benchmarks, would have pegged at the bus speed of the drive it replaced, and holds enough to edit uncompressed HD video on a laptop or carry around a substantial game and/or media library. Random access is incrementally faster than the competition, but perhaps thanks to the Advanced Format technology employed, sequential read speeds are pretty difficult to touch. When one takes into consideration that the disk’s peak speed is maintained over far more of the disk surface than other drives – even the excellent Momentus – and it got an award. In all fairness, this needs one too. But how good is it?

• Good seek time – on par with the industry standard
• Excellent read-write speed, which is maintained over far more of the platter than competing drives
• Power draw of 1.75 watts during seek, and 0.8 watts at idle; competing drives of similar capacity and specifications tend to draw at least 20% more.
• Less power means better battery life, and cooler operation – this idles slightly cooler (37° vs. 40°) than my last drive and is significantly cooler under load.
• Best-in-class storage capacity; any further increases in space require stepping down to a 5400 RPM drive

And the not-so-good:

• 28 dB is not the quietest drive on the market – but it is close.
• Still commands a premium over slower drives – but the cost of speed is coming down.

The best laptop hard drive on the market two years ago won our Techware Approved award. The best available up ’til CES won the same honor. This drive represents the same market niche – the fastest laptop drive available, in the largest capacity it is sold in. What’s more, the price premium for a fast drive has fallen to about $10 over another drive of the same size and considerably slower. Considering the spacious storage, jaw-dropping disk speed, and doing it all at a competition-embarrassingly low power draw, I can only conclude that this drive is better. And here at TechwareLabs, we’re all about the better. In recognition of Western Digital’s excellence in engineering endeavors, I present them with this award for Awesome Hardware.

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