Review on 💽 High-Performance Western Digital Scorpio Blue 750 GB SATA Notebook Hard Drive - WD7500BPVT by Daniel Roe

இ Fuzzy Wuzzy's summary:ѾѾѾѾѾѾ Highly recommended with warm flakes! I have previously installed two Western Digital Scorpio Blue 5400rpm 1TB drives on a laptop that is commonly used for editing photos, images and very large video files. I liked it so much I added this 750GB to a four year old Windows laptop. My old laptop has a weaker battery and a 90w PSU so I choose this Scorpio Blue over the Scorpio Black because I don't need maximum performance and prefer a more power efficient, cooler and quieter hard drive. The form factor of 0.9.5mm height means it fits most laptops. The drive was shipped from Revain in Revain's "No Disappointment" packaging, which consisted of a cardboard box and molded cardboard that held the drive inside the box. The two longer sides of the drive have four threaded inserts for use with standard mounting screws; Mounting screws or hard drive bracket/bracket are not included with this hard drive. This drive is designed for a very low noise level of 22dBA idle and 25dBA seek/read/write. With this drive installed in my laptop, I can barely hear the drive in a very quiet room when my ears are about a foot or two from the drive in the laptop and the drive is actively reading/writing. When the laptop is idle I can't hear the drive at all. And even though this drive is actively seeking/reading/writing, its tiny noise is drowned out by my laptop's fan noise, even when the fan spins up at the lowest speed. It turns out that this 5400 RPM Scorpio Blue drive compares well to the 7200 RPM Scorpio Black drives, although the faster Black drives also have 16MB of cache versus the smaller 8MB of cache -Have storage on Blue drives. On my installed 750GB drive, HD Tune reported min/max/avg read speeds of 53, 110, and 85 MB/s and min/max/avg write speeds of 40, 108, and 84 MB/s. This is only 15-18% slower than the 750GB 7200RPM Scorpio Black drive, which runs faster, heats up and uses more power. This 5400 RPM drive is slightly faster than the Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM drive and even compares better to the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive. Read and write times on this random access drive are also comparable to Seagate Scorpio Black 7200 rpm and Momentus 7200 rpm drives. If you're trying to decide between a Scorpio Black 7200 RPM drive (or another faster 7200 RPM mobile form factor drive), the Black drive is about 15-18% faster than this drive. However, this 750GB drive is slightly slower than the 1TB WD Blue Mobile Hard Drive: 2.5-inch, 5400rpm, SATA II, 8MB Cache - WD10JPVT. So if you can spend about $20 more for the 250GB additional storage on the 1TB version of this drive, you'll get slightly faster read/write speeds compared to this 750GB drive. Western Digital offers "Acronis TrueImage". which can be downloaded from their website so you can copy all your data from the old hard drive to the new hard drive so you don't have to reinstall your operating system to take full advantage of the new hard drive. If you replaced your primary system drive, you can either use cloning software like Acronis True Image to mirror all your system files and applications back to the new drive, or you can perform a fresh operating system installation and reinstall any applications you are using. The advantage of cloning system files and applications is that it is much faster to transfer everything back to the new drive. The advantage of reinstalling the operating system and applications is that you can clean up your files frequently and free up hundreds of megabytes of disk space (which is equivalent to completely cleaning out a basement of years of stuff). If you're trying to decide between a Scorpio Black 7200 RPM drive (or any other faster 7200 RPM mobile form factor drive), a "black" drive will be about 10-15% faster than this "blue" disk. This drive performs fairly well for a 5400 RPM drive and does not draw as much power or generate as much heat as a 7200 RPM drive. If you use your laptop frequently without a network connection and want to maximize battery life, 5400 RPM drives drain your battery less than 7200 RPM drives. Scorpio Black drives already use less power than many 7200 RPM laptop drives. But these Scorpio Blue drives consume 20% less power when reading/writing and 25% less power when idle than Scorpio Black drives. I can dream of the day when two 1TB SSD drives will be available for laptops, but right now this 5400rpm drive really isn't that much slower than most 7200rpm drives of my own Research and the opinions of others to help me make informed purchasing decisions. I hope this review helped you become a wise shopper! :)