When you purchase a notebook you will be most often be offered a 250 GB hard drive and if you decide to purchase a MacBook Pro you are offered a 250 GB drive as standard with hefty prices if you decide to upgrade to another drive from Apple.com it is not cheap. Compared to the desktop scenario where you can pick up a 1 TB 3.5 drive cheap.
Today we have the WD Scorpio Blue WD10JPVT 1TB 5400 RPM 2.5 SATA II note harddrive. With it’s 5400 RPM drive speed, 8MB cache and a 3GB/s SATA interface speed it is the largest drive out there from Western Digital if you are on the look out for a big notebook drive.
Western Digital offers two different Scorpio Blue notebook drives so that it could be worth to point out the differences between these two drives since they are two different drives.
| Model | Capacity | RPM | Height | Performance | Acoustics | |
| WD10JPVT | 1TB | 5400 | 9.5mm | 150 MB/s | 22dBA Idle | |
| WD10TPVT | 1TB | 5200 | 12.5mm | 124 MB/s | 24dBA Idle |
It uses WD ‘Advanced Format’ technology. Before most hard drives were written in the traditional 512 bytes sectores. Over the last three years they industry have switched to larger sector of 4 kilobytes (4,096B). Advanced Format is Western Digitals way of describing what hard driv they are using.
This means that if you purchase the hard drive and choose to install a new OS on it you will notice a difference. if you clone an older storage drive using WD AF technology you first need to run the WD Advanced Format Hard Drive Download Utility to align the drive after the cloning is done. If this is not done you will not maximize the performance from the drive.
WD Scorpio Blue WD10JPVT Hard Drive Features:
- Form Factor: 2.5″ x 1/8H (100.2mm x 69.85 x 9.5mm)
- Capacity: 1.0 TB
- Interface Type: Serial ATA-300
- Buffer Size: 8 MB
- Features: Native Command Queuing (NCQ)
- Seek Time: 12.0 ms (average)
- Average Latency: 5.50 ms (nominal)
- Spindle Speed: 5400 RPM
- Noise Level: 22dBA at idle and 25dBA in seek mode 0
- Power Use: 1.40 Watts Read/Write, 0.59 Watts at idle and 0.18 Watts Sleep/Standby
- Manufacturer Warranty: 3 year limited warranty
The Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB Sata 2.5 laptop hard drive impressed and if you look at capacity and performance with this hard drive you get the maximum with this drive. The only thing you have to remember is that you need to get a back up if you drive breaks or get stolen. The Western Digital Scorpio Blue series drives comes with a three year warranty which is standard for hard drives today.
When you look at rotational storage devices noise is always a concern, the WD Scorpio Blue 1TB drive has an average accoustics ratings of 22dBA and 25dBA during a seek operation. I have used it extensively and have not found it disturbing at all. If you are looking for a quiet rotational storage device you can not go wrong with this drive. You can check out more information about the hard drive over on Western Digitals website.
If you are curios on how to install a hard drive Western Digital has a great video that shows you how to install a hard drive.
