Notebooks don’t have the roomiest of drives. The most space you can expect out of a HDD of a standard notebook is 320GB – 500GB if you’re lucky. That’s the main reason many notebook owners spring for an external HDD to store their data – their notebooks simply don’t have enough room. Well, there’s another solution to your space woes – the Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD10JPVT 1TB drive. This little 2.5-inch drive has enough space for a majority of data while giving you decent performance.
One of the reasons why you don’t see notebooks sporting 1TB hard drives is because of height. Early 1TB 2.5-inch drives had a 12.5mm height requirement, which meant early drives couldn’t fit in standard notebooks which could only accommodate 9.5mm drives. The Scorpio Blue manages to pull this off through the use of two 500GB platters under the hood of the drive. Other features include shock resistance (which is important for mobile drives) and decreased power consumption (the Scorpio Blue pulls in 1.4 watts during active use).
Of course, the WD10JPVT doesn’t have it all. It has a 5400 RPM spindle speed and 8MB cache, which is the typical specs of hard drives in its class. If you’re looking for fast drive for your notebook, this ain’t it. But again, storage is one of the main concerns of mobile users, not speed.
Nevertheless, we would be remiss if we didn’t at least paint a picture of how the WD10JPVT performs. We used two programs to gauge the performance of the WD10JPVT – CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 and HD Tune Pro 4.61.
Under HD Tune Pro 4.61, we get an average transfer rate of 85.3 MB/s, with a peak of 112.1 MB/s.
For CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1, it was pretty much the same – 112.8 MB/s read, 110 MB/s write. Judging from those numbers, the WD10JPVT had pretty respectable performance, especially considering this is a 5400 RPM drive. We also didn’t notice increased noise during testing, which again is a plus for a mobile drive.
Of course, that amount of storage doesn’t come cheap. If you’re set on buying one for your notebook, expect to shell out Php 5,995.
What’s Hot:
Respectable performance
1TB of available space
Quiet
What’s Not:
Not as fast as 7200 RPM drives
Pricey
Bottomline:
The WD Digital Scorpio Blue WD10JPVT 1TB is a good upgrade for people who crave more storage in their notebooks – as long as you can afford the Php 5,995 sticker price.
Buymeter: 8.5