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WD Scorpio Blue drives offer high-performance, low power consumption, and cool operation, perfect for notebooks and other portable devices. Pick the drive that suits your needs with the confidence in knowing that all WD Scorpio Blue drives are built to the highest standards of quality and reliability.
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Technical Details
- 500 GB- SATA 3 Gb/s
- 8 MB Cache
- 5400 RPM
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By A. Dent (Minas Anor, GD)
QUICK EVALUATION AND RATING:
The Western Digital 500GB 2.5" SATA II is a quiet, fast, easy to install, drive. Based on my experience with WD (I own several), the Scorpios are reliable drives. The 2.5" SATAs easily and perfectly mount inside a PS3's or laptop's drive bay where they can replace the laptop's or the PS3's original 20-40-60-80-160GB drive and the new PS3 120GM SLIM's without voiding the warranty.
I have this exact model running inside my laptop as I am writing this review. The upgrade was relatively easy and it's been working well for the past several months. I can't think of any flaws and the price is right so the 500GB Scorpio Blue earns its 5 stars.
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Laptop Upgrade:
My 2 year old Thinkpad T60 came with a wimpy 60GB SATA drive. I needed the ability to upgrade to the much larger 500GB and do it without having to reinstall the OS, apply the service packs and then reinstall and configure 100 different little apps.
Acronis True Image Home 2009 PC Backup & Recovery allowed me to do all of the above in about one hour. Its Utilities section has a 'clone' option that would copy EVERYTHING, including the Master Boot Record/Sector (MBR) from the puny 60GB drive unto the 500GB while allowing me to control the size of the active partition - this while the 500GB was connected through a USB wire and the laptop booted off the program's CD.
Once the operation completed (50 minutes) I simply removed the old 60GB drive off my laptop and replaced it with the 500GB drive. Once the laptop was turned back on it booted up happily, with a 200GB master partition and a 300GB second partition. There are 3 words that I have to use to describe the process: PERFECTION and COMPLETE SATISFACTION. This capability alone is worth the price of this product.
To my surprise, with the new drive, the Primary Hard Disk score as computed by Microsoft (right click on 'My computer' then select 'Properties') jumped from a decent 4.8 to an unexpected 5.7.
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PS3 Upgrade:
I have replaced my original PS3 drive with a 320 GB WD quite a while ago but, over the last weekend, I helped a friend of mine upgrade his PS3's with this one. He decided to pick this model and, since I had a great experience with the 320GB version, I encouraged him to go WD.
My friend believes that the 500GB is at the peak of price/performance curve at this time. Like me, he has no plans of storing a movie library on the PS3 so he expects for the 500GB to be sufficient for the life of his console. After that, it's likely that he'll be buying the next generation game/multimedia machine. The 320 GB model that I used some time ago is still available but the 500 GB is only $30 more so it makes a lot of sense to spend a little more and enjoy the extra storage.
Advice to the PS3 upgraders from someone who, after some hesitation, actually did it and then did it again a few more times for friends and family since:
- If you need to format this drive or any drive to FAT32 - and you need a FAT32 partition for the PS3 backup - the best utility I found [...] - Google it and you shall find it out there. I'm not reviewing the formatter utility but I can tell you that it does a drive in less than 10 seconds AND it works on Vista too.
- It helps to have a USB-connected drive handy to back up your PS3 content before upgrading. With one of these as the backup device, the PS3 fully restores EVERYTHING, including whatever copywrited or protected objects, such as, in my case the PS2 memory cards emulations and all the game saves.
I will not go into upgrade details because there are lots of guides on the Net including great Youtube videos on how to do it but, if anyone has any questions, do leave a note and I shall reply as soon as I get to read it.
To conclude, the upgrade proceeded without any glitches and my friend has now a perfectly working console where storage won't be an issue for some time to come. PS3 performance appears to the same, which is how it should be. I haven't heard back from my friend in 8 days now so, my assumption is that all is working well and he's busy enjoying his upgraded PS3.
By Thaddius Mumford (SAN JOSE, CA United States)
I have a Scorpio Blue 320GB and 500GB. Both are very reliable and fast but I really like the 500GB. Runs great in an external enclosure, such as Addonics Snap-In eSATA II.
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