Western Digital Scorpio Drives

Western Digital divides their internal mobile hard drives into four distinct families, identified by their colours :

• the WD Blue family of mainstream performance drives, with capacities of 250 GB to 1 TB.

• the WD Green family of power-efficient and lower-cost drives, with capacities of 1 TB to 2 TB.

• the WD Black family of high-performance drives, consisting of 7200 RPM drives as well as the unique WD Black² dual-drive.

• the WD Red family of RAID-optimized drives, with capacities of 750 GB to 1 TB.

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.

Specification Comparison

Packaging

Western Digital sent the 1 TB WD Blue (WD10SPCX) in a relatively large cardboard box, one which is usually used for 3.5" hard disk drives. Inside, the drive is secured in place by a combination of two plastic spacers and a cardboard insert, which also reduce the amount of shock transmitted to the drive during delivery. If you ever intend to mail a hard disk drive somewhere, this is how you should pack the drive.

The WD10SPCX was sealed within an anti-static plastic pouch with a sachet of dessicants to keep it dry. All you need to do is just cut open the plastic pouch and slide out the drive. Be sure to ground yourself before removing and handling the hard disk drive as static can damage it. In particular, you should try to avoid touching the exposed PCB located at the base of the drive.

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