Western Digital Scorpio WD2500BEVS 2.5-inch SATA HDD

Normally, we don't go too much into detail about the physical appearance of a hard drive or how to install one, since that is not what you came here to read about most likely. With a 2.5" laptop drive, though, we think readers who have never seen or installed a laptop drive may be interested in seeing what they look like and how to install one.

2.5" hard drives are quite impressive and make the geek in us grin every time we see one (for an even bigger geeky thrill, check out a 1.8" hard drive). Check out the pics below to see just how much smaller a 2.5" drive is than a 3.5" drive.

The downside to storage in laptops is that almost all laptops on the market, save for some high end DTR models, only allow for one hard drive to be installed. This means that you will most likely have to remove your current drive if you want to switch to the Scorpio WD2500BEVS. With many laptops, this should be a relatively simple task. For our test machine, the Toshiba Portege M400, it was about as simple as it gets. We just had to flip the laptop over, unscrew two screws, remove the hard drive panel, pull up on a release tab, and disconnect the drive.

After removing the drive from its small installation cage, we simply reversed the steps below, and we were all done. It is as simple as installing a 3.5" drive into an ATX case.

In the image above, you can see the SATA power and data ports that we mentioned earlier. These ports are exactly the same (size and shape-wise) as those found on 3.5" desktop hard drives.

When testing the Western Digital Scorpio WD2500BEVS SATA hard drive, we used a Toshiba Portege M400 for all testing except the HD Tach write tests. The M400 sports an Intel Core Duo 2.0GHz processor, 2GB 667MHz DDR2, and a 100GB 5400RPM SATA hard drive. For the HD Tach write tests, we used a desktop PC because that test requires an unformatted, unpartitioned drive. The Scorpio WD2500BEVS was compared to the Toshiba 100GB MK1032GSX found in the Portege M400 and to a 3.5" 7200RPM 500GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 SATA hard drive. We decided to include the performance of the latter simply to provide you with a reference point since many of you are probably more familiar with desktop hard drive performance than laptop hard drive performance.

HotHardware Test System Toshiba Portege M400