Western Digital Blue (WD10SPCX) 1 TB Slim Mobile Hard Disk Drive

The new WD Blue drives also come in slimmer form factors with heights of just 7 mm and 5 mm, allowing them to fit in ever thinner Ultrabooks. In addition, they offer these key features :

• Low Power Consumption - State-of-the-art seeking algorithms and advanced power management features ensure low power consumption and long battery life.

• Quiet - In a notebook drive, silence is golden. WD’s exclusive noise reducing technologies yield one of the quietest 2.5-inch hard drives on the market.

• Available SATA 6 Gb/s interface -The SATA 6 Gb/s interface provides greater flexibility for use with the latest chipsets as well as backwards compatibility to legacy systems with SATA 3 Gb/s requirements. (xPVX, xPCX, and MPCK models only).

• NoTouch™ ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

When Western Digital launched the WD10JPVT, a 1 TB Scorpio Blue drive, it featured two of their new high-capacity 500 GB 2.5" platters. The drive was thus able to fit standard 2.5" storage bays. If you recall, the original 1 TB Scorpio Blue drive (the WD10TPVT) had a thickness of 12.5 mm, which prevented it from fitting most 2.5" storage bays, thereby relegating it mostly to special applications like portable USB drives.

Even so, the standard 9.5 mm form factor of the WD10JPVT was too thick for the Ultrabooks. To accommodate these thinner notebooks, Western Digital created the WD10SPCX, which is basically an improved 7 mm version of the WD10JPVT. It sports two of the same 500 GB Advanced Format platters in a slimmer form factor, with double the SDRAM cache and a faster SATA 6 Gb/s interface. But will all that translate into better performance? Let's take a look.

For more details, read our Comprehensive Review!

To discuss about this review, head over to the forum thread!

Lowest PriceGrabber Price

Review

• Comprehensive Review

Model

• WD10SPCX

Advanced Format (AF)

• Yes, Emulation Mode

Formatted Capacity

• 1,000,204 MB

Guaranteed Sectors

• 1,953,525,168

Bytes Per Sector

• 512 bytes (Emulated)

Platters

• 2 Platters

Read/Write Heads

• 4 Read/Write Heads

Spindle Speed

• 5,400 RPM

Cache Buffer

• 16 MB SDRAM

Average Seek

• NA

Track-to-Track Seek

• NA

Average Latency

• 5.5 ms

Drive Ready Time

• 2.8 seconds (average)

Internal Data Transfer Rate

• 140 MB/s (sustained, maximum)

Maximum I/O Transfer Rate

• 600 MB/s

Interface

• Serial ATA 6 Gb/s

Supported SATA Data Transfer Modes

• 6.0 Gbits/s
• 3.0 Gbits/s
• 1.5 Gbits/s

SATA Hotplug Capability

• Yes

Maximum Height

• 7.0 mm
• 0.28 inches

Maximum Width

• 69.85 mm
• 2.75 inches

Maximum Length

• 100.2 mm
• 3.94 inches

Maximum Weight

• 90 g
• 0.21 lb