Earlier this year, WD proudly introduced to the world the WD Scorpio Blue 750GB (WD7500BVT). The big news about this notebook hard disk drive (HDD) was its storage capacity, which is the industry’s largest in the 9.5mm thick, 2.5-inch form factor. Yet, apart from the HDD’s enormous space, also interesting are some WD-exclusive features which you will learn about as you read on.
On the outside, the WD Scorpio Blue 750GB is primarily no different from most of the 2.5-inch HDDs that are currently available in the market. With a standard thickness of 9.5mm, the HDD suggests that it has a stack of two platters within, each having an areal density of 375GB. Given that thickness, users are assured that this HDD can easily fit inside most notebooks and netbooks, unlike in the case of the thicker, tri-platter 12.5mm variant.
Armed To The Tooth
For durability and reliability, the surfaces of the platters are protected from shock by WD’s ShockGuard technology. Working in parallel with ShockGuard is SecurePark, a mechanism inside the drive which 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 longer drive lifespan due to less head wear and improved non-operational shock tolerance.
Securely attached beneath the HDD’s metal casing is the circuit board. A thin insulation sheet protects the latter from shorting out against the drive’s housing. Checking out the board, conspicuous on its layout are three important ICs: a Marvell 88i9045-TFJ2 controller, Texas Instruments SH6601AF motor driver, and a Winbond W9425G6EH-5 memory module. These ICs can be found on other models of WD HDDs as well.
New Format
One of the main features of the Scorpio Blue 750GB is Advanced Format technology. This feature enables users to read and write more data into the same available space on the HDD. In order to get the most out of the Advanced Format feature, users may be required to run the WD Align software utility after installing the operating system or partition and format the drive as a secondary drive. The WD Align utility aligns partitions on the Advanced Format drive to ensure it provides full performance for certain configurations. Similar to other WD HDDs that feature Advanced Format technology, the Scorpio Blue 750GB is optimized for newer operating systems such as Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
Apart from being one of the industry’s notebook HDDs with the largest storage capacity, this WD is also among the quietest. WD achieved this feat by applying WhisperDrive technology which makes the drive efficiently seek data and, at the same time, cut down on power consumption.
In our test using the HDTach application, it was discovered that this Scorpio has an average read speed of 80MBps. This figure is much faster than what we got from testing an SSD and older Caviar and Raptor HDDs.
Final Thoughts
By and large, the WD Scorpio Blue 750GB is an ideal solution for notebook computers and other portable devices whose users require extreme capacities in a small package to go along with robust and reliable operation.
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