The Connectors

The 320 GB Scorpio Black is only available with a Serial ATA interface. It comes with native support for SATA 3Gb/s but can revert to the slower SATA 1.5Gb/s if the SATA controller cannot support the faster interface.

Like all Serial ATA drives, it comes the standard SATA data (left) and power (right) connectors and is hot-pluggable. That means you can connect and disconnect this hard drive to your PC while it's still running.

To the left side of these SATA connectors is the jumper block. Generally, you do not need to mess around with the jumper block. In fact, Western Digital did not even provide a jumper with the drive. It's really meant for the notebook manufacturer to tweak the drive for a particular build. For those who are interested, here are the three jumper settings available for the WD Scorpio Black hard drive.

By default, spread spectrum clocking and reduced power spin-up are disabled. If you want to, you can use a jumper to enable either spread spectrum clocking or reduced power spin-up, but not both at the same time. However, it is recommended that you leave it at its default setting.

Usable Capacity

The Western Digital Scorpio Black officially has a formatted capacity of 320 GB. We checked that out by formatting both in NTFS using Windows Vista.

The actual formatted capacity was 320,070,479,872 bytes. This is slightly (70 MB) higher than the official formatted capacity. However, after formatting, about 104 MB was allocated to the NTFS file system, reducing its actual usable capacity to just below 320 GB.

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