| Article Index |
|---|
| Western Digital Scorpio 250GB SATA 2.5" Hard Drive Review/Comparison |
| Page 2 - PCMark05 |
| Page 3 - HD Tune |
| Page 4 - Conclusion |
| All Pages |
Western Digital has recently made available a 250GB 2.5” Serial ATA notebook drive which makes it the biggest on the market. We
take a look and compare its performance to some other popular notebook drives.
The model of drive we’re looking at today from Western Digital is the WD2500BEVS, which is part of their “Scorpio” range of notebook drives, with the following specifications:
- 250GB Storage Capacity
- Serial ATA Interface (1.5Gigabit/s)
- 5,400rpm spin speed
- 12ms access time
- 8MB Cache Buffer
As all notebook drives look the same, are easy to install and operate in basically the same manner, the only real way to review one is to test its performance, so will be comparing the new Western Digital 250GB to its little brother, the 160GB Serial ATA 2.5” Notebook drive (Model#WD1600BEVS) as well as the current king of speed in notebook drives, the Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160GB 2.5” Serial ATA Notebook drive (Model# ST9160823AS), which of course runs at 7200rpm compared to both the Western Digitals, which run at 5400rpm. So while the Seagate should still be the faster drive of the three, it will be interesting to see how the new Western Digital 250GB with its higher bit density fairs against it.
The Test Setup:
2.5” Notebook sized hard drives, such as what we’re testing today, utilise a standard Serial-ATA connection (shown below):
This is the same SATA connection as 3.5” desktop hard drives, therefore all tests will be performed on our usual desktop rig, which consists of:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU
- ASUS P5N32-E SLI, nForce680i Motherboard
- Corsair TWIN2X 2GB PC2-8500 Memory Kit (2 x 1GB)
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA-II Hard Drive (System Drive)
- Antec Basiq 500W ATX Power Supply
- Windows XP Pro SP2
With this hardware setup we will be testing the drives using PCMark05 which helps test the drives in real world performance situations, such as starting windows and performing a virus scan, we will also be using HD Tune which tests the maximum possible throughput and average seek times of the drives.
