Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVT
by Western Digital
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List Price: Our Price: $98.66 You Save: $21.33 (18%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $69.00 (click here) Category: Personal Computer See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVT
Customer Review: Great upgrade for MSI Wind Netbook
Summary: 5 Stars
Been wanting to upgrade my 80 gig WD hard drive in my MSI Wind so I can carry a lot of my media with me on my trips. I travel a lot to other countries and love traveling light (One of the reason why I got the MSI Wind). I don't like carrying my External Western Digital Passport as well, but also it will drain your batteries since it's basically powering 2 HDs at a time.
In airports I like to just get my notebook out and access my media and not have to plug in my external HD and try to figure where to lay it down (and with the short USB cable, it does not help). So this 500GB HD has done its job and I love it. This is also a back up to my External WD drive just in case that craps out or this one does and I dont have to use the internal HD on my Mac as a backup anymore.
Installation is very easy and noticed there is not much of a weight difference between the 80 gig and this one, so this didnt really add any weight to my notebook. I also noticed its produces a little more noise than the 80 gig. Its not annoying, you just can hear a little hum sound where the 80 gig was not noticeable. I also noticed that it drains a little more power than the previous HD but not to much, but also bought a 9cell battery so it doesn't bother me too much.
Customer Review: Happiest I've been with an electronics purchase for quite some time.
Summary: 5 Stars
Double your hard drive capacity (or more in most lower priced laptops) by installing this highly compatible, great quality internal drive. It is a straightforward fit, enough so that when I couldn't achieve success trading out the hard drive as a means to resurrect my less than one year old Acer laptop after it got hacked (the malicious worm/virus/Trojan managed to fry the circuitry of somewhere on the motherboard too, not just the drive), I swapped out the drive in a nine year old Toshiba laptop instead, with this same drive. Took right off when I formatted it and loaded Windows 7 operating system. The drive has zero software on it upon arrival, and that is up to you after physical installation. I was impressed with the smooth cooperation of this component. Upgrading your laptop has no easier piece of that puzzle. Keep in mind that anything in this style of hard drive over 600 GB capacity is thicker (and may not fit in laptop installation). If you're upgrading your laptop like I did, you can replace a 60 GB ancient drive with this new replacement 500 GB and nearly gain ten times the storage capacity. You will have to format and install all new software, but I was going to anyway.Customer Review: Fast drive, great price.
Summary: 5 Stars
Pros - Fast. I'm getting sustained 70+ MB/s writes on large file transfers off a 3Ware RAID controller, and 60+ MB/s off the ICH10R chipsets on my MB's with these drives set as SATA/Ehanced IDE. I'm replacing all my 3.5" space heaters with these drives for backups and such. Velociraptors aside, if you put this drive on a good RAID controller or a good MB chipset I don't think you will lose anything but noise and heat for day to day use. I'm guessing 2 of these in RAID 0 off a decent controller could threaten quite a few SSD's out there.
Cons - As backup and file storage drives, I have no complaints. You will of course need to add an adapter or drive tray system if you are going to use it in a desktop. I can't speak to these as boot drives.
Other thoughts - These drives use a couple of watts; even the greenest 3.5" drive is going to use 3 times that, and most 3.5" drives are going to use 4-6 times that much electricity. This drive proves the days of a laptop drive doing 20 MB/s are gone. It would be interesting to see how well this drive did if the RPM's went up to 7200, but there's really no need for that at these price/performance levels.
Customer Review: Upgraded my netbook.
Summary: 5 Stars
I have an Acer Aspire One D250 netbook that came with a 160Gb hard drive.
When I updated the OS on this little netbook to Ubuntu 10.04, the performance of the netbook literally went from DOG to RocketShip. I decided to permanently install Ubuntu, but unfortunately, I have a couple of Windows applications I still need, so I have to retain Win XP. This meant moving to a dual-boot environment, and to do that, I wanted a larger hard drive so I had enough room for both OS'es.
I partitioned the 500Gb drive into 3 partitions; a FAT partition for Win XP, a FAT partition for a common area for data, and a Linux partition for Ubuntu. During the Ubuntu install, a 4th (boot) and 5th (swap) partition was created to facilitate the dual-boot environment. The hard drive works great in this environment.
Normally, I would not recommend investing any money to upgrade a netbook. Netbooks are intended to be low-cost entry-level systems, primary for surfing the internet and email.
But moving to Ubuntu improved the performance so much, dual-booting justified the larger hard drive.
Customer Review: Best upgrade I've ever had! (Unibody MacBook)
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought the new MacBook when it first arrived, usually I'll wait for the first generation to pass for any bugs to work out but with the solid construction and the death of an older laptop, I jumped in. I opted to max the ram (4gb at the time) but go for the basic (160gb) hard drive. I've upgraded many components on varying machines but was able to do the manual, physical swap in a couple of minutes. I got an Acomadata Tango external enclosure, popped this drive in, used Apple's disk utility to do an exact copy, less than two hours to transfer the 130gb I had stuffed on the old drive, chose this as the start up drive, popped open the macbook unplugged the old one and put this one in it's place. It's a really nice feeling to see 335 GB available at the bottom of each Finder window that pops up. In addition, I've got a back up (albeit a mere 160gb one) drive that's bootable. For $90 bucks and two hours, that's a lot of real estate. I wish more decisions were as simple and had as much bang for the buck as this one. Highly recommended! Now if I could just get the 2nd gen MacBook Pro screen replaced for less than $100 . . .