Western Digital Scorpio WD2500BEVS 2.5-inch SATA HDD
Introduction, Features & Specifications
Most of you probably already know that 2.5" notebook hard drives typically aren't as big or fast as hard drives found in desktop machines. In case you aren't aware, most laptops are sold with 5400RPM hard drives that range from 60GB to 100GB. In contrast, most desktops are currently sold with 7200RPM hard drives with capacities of up to 1TB. Just like desktop hard drives, though, laptop hard drives have gotten quite a bit bigger and faster over the last couple years.
While desktop hard drives hit 1TB (1,000GB) a while ago, laptop hard drives recently reached 250GB. At least one manufacturer will have a 320GB laptop hard drive available soon, but that still doesn't get us anywhere near 1TB in our laptops. Thankfully, though, if performance is your main concern, you can get a 7200RPM laptop hard drive now if you chose to do so.
Today, we have one of the largest laptop hard drives on the market in our labs, the 250GB Western Digital Scorpio WD2500BEVS. At 5400RPM, it may not be the mobile speed king, but this 2.5" SATA hard drive offers a plethora of nice features, like an 8MB cache and WD's WhisperDrive and ShockGuard technology. Plus, the benchmarks might just surprise you about how well a 5400RPM drive can perform. Read on to see how well the Scorpio WD2500BEVS performs compared to a 100GB 5400RPM 2.5" hard drive and a 500GB 7200RPM 3.5" drive.
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PHYSICAL SPECS
Capacity: 250 GB Interface: SATA 1.5 Gb/s Spindle Speed: 5400 RPM Cache Buffer: 8 MB Height: 9.5 mm Length: 100.2 mm Width: 69.85 mm Weight: 0.117 kg PERFORMANCE SPECS Seek Times Average Latency: 4.20 ms Read Seek Time: 12.0 ms Track-To-Track Seek Time: 2.0 ms Transfer Rate Buffer To Host (Serial ATA): 1.5 Gb/s (Max) Buffer To Disk: 600 Mbits/s (Max) Acoustics Idle Mode: 24 dBA (average) Seek Mode 0: 26 dBA (average) Power Requirements Read/Write: 2.50 Watts Idle: 2.00 Watts Standby: 0.25 Watts Sleep: 0.10 Watts |
FEATURES
Massive capacity - Whether they are in an external drive or a notebook computer, WD’s 250 GB 2.5-inch drives offer the most available capacity for space-hungry operating systems like Windows Vista™, plus plenty of room left over for photos, music, and video. Fast and efficient - With 5400 RPM spin speed and 12 ms access time, even the most demanding customer will appreciate the performance achieved by WD Scorpio drives. Quiet - In a notebook drive, silence is golden. WD’s exclusive WhisperDrive™ combines state-of-the-art seeking algorithms to yield one of the quietest 2.5-inch hard drives on the market. These algorithms also optimize the way a drive seeks for data, which significantly improves power consumption. So now silence (and longer battery life) is golden. Reliable and Rugged - WD's ShockGuard™ technology protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks. WD's SecurePark™ parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface resulting in improved long term reliability due to less head wear, and improved non- operational shock tolerance. Tested for Compatibility - We perform tests on hundreds of systems and a multitude of platforms in our FIT Lab and Mobile Compatibility Lab to give our customers confidence that our drives will work in their systems. 3 Year Warranty |
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If you are already familiar with desktop hard drives, not much (other than the physical size) will surprise you about the appearance of the Scorpio WD2500BEVS. As you can see in the images above, the drive has a white label with black informational text on the top and green PCB on the bottom.
The Scorpio WD2500BEVS is a SATA drive, and as such, it features the same SATA power and data connectors that you are used to seeing on desktop SATA drives. For those of you wondering, yes, that does mean you could install this drive in your main desktop rig at home if you so desired. The benefits of installing a drive like this in a desktop system are that it requires considerably less power than a 3.5" drive, it is relatively quiet, and it is physically small, which means it doesn't take up much room.
The Scorpio WD2500BEVS achieves its quiet acoustic profile by way of Western Digital's exclusive WhisperDrive technology, which is essentially a set of seeking algorithms optimized to yield a low noise level. These algorithms will also help extend your laptop's battery life since they also affect the way the drive seeks for data, improving (lowering) power consumption. In addition to WhisperDrive, the Scorpio WD2500BEVS also boasts two technologies, ShockGuard and SecurePark, to keep your data safe.
