Western Digital Scorpio Blue (WD10JPVT)

Smaller 2.5-inch disks used for laptops normally can’t fit in as much as their bigger 3.5-inch desktop cousins, but Western Digital begs to differ here with its new Scorpio Blue WD10JPVT model.

The Scorpio Blue packs a whopping 1TB of space thanks to two high-density platters, and at just 9.5mm thin, the drive could be the notebook storage upgrade you’ve been looking for – especially since it can survive 400G drops.

Although on paper the specifications look average, with 5,400rpm spin speed and a small 8MB cache, performance is surprisingly good. This is partly due to high-density platters with large, 4,096-byte sectors instead of older-style 512-byte ones.

In fact, the Scorpio Blue is swift enough to keep pace with a Samsung 3.5-inch 1TB Spinpoint drive, with 32MB cache and 7,200rpm spin speed in some PCMark 7 storage tests, and Atto Bench 32. With the latter, we saw 116Mbyte/s transfers on medium to large file sizes, which is excellent. A latency reading of 5.3ms is very good too.

Being fast doesn’t mean the Scorpio Blue is noisy: the quoted 25dBa for seeks and 22dBa for idle levels means you can’t hear the drive operating inside an enclosure. The drive is also cool-running, and uses a mere 1.4 Watts maximum for reads and writes. Idle, it consumes 0.59 Watts and on stand-by, 0.18 Watts, considerably better than older Scorpio Blue models.

Cavernous, fast, quiet and cool: Western Digital got all the important bits right with the Scorpio Blue WD10JPVT. While the RRP is a bit high at $206 inc GST, you can find it for $155-$160 in stores. At that price, the Scorpio Blue is an excellent buy if you need more storage.