Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB review

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Verdict:

The largest standard-sized 1TB laptop disk yet - it's good value, but performance isn't all it could be

Review Date: 3 Sep 2011

Price when reviewed: £90

Supplier: http://www.scan.co.uk

Reviewed By: Alan Lu

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

User Rating

Previous 1TB internal laptop disks have been 12.5mm thick – too big to fit inside most laptops. Western Digital's 1TB Scorpio Blue is a standard 9.5mm disk, so doesn’t have this problem.

Although the Scorpio Blue has a spindle speed of just 5,400rpm, its performance copying large files was close to that of a 7,200rpm laptop disk. Large files were written at 74.7MB/s and read at 101.8MB/s. It was also fast at reading small files, doing so at 69.9MB/s. It was very slow at writing small files though, managing just 27MB/s – a problem we've seen with previous Scorpio disks.

If you can live with this performance blemish, then the Scorpio Blue is a great value way to pack staggering amounts of storage into your laptop. It works out at just 9p per gigabyte – the same price per gigabyte as 750GB disks. However, as this is the first 9.5mm 1TB hard disk we've seen it may be worth waiting until new models arrive before you buy, as they may not suffer from the Scorpio Blue's small file performance problems.

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