Mobile users of today are looking for faster and more energy efficient solutions.  While solid state drives (SSDs) are in vogue, none too many of these expensive disks are to be found yet as the primary disk of choice in the notebook. 

Along comes Western Digital with its range of Scorpio Black mobile 2.5-inch disks.  These are primarily designed for the rugged road warrior who requires power, performance and a disk that does not compromise battery life. But we also see many gamers who love to use this form of mobile function and rely heavily upon cutting edge technology notebooks that have sufficiently powerful disks to run today’s modern games.

This is an unusual outing for us as we normally do not look into these items, though vogue changes in today’s lifestyles mean we have to keep up with the times. Many notebooks contain the more modern ATI and Nvidia professional cards as it means that the studio/architect can present to the client readily a scene or drawing in uncompromised professionalism with the item in question firing up immediately with no lag time. But, and there always is a but, this can be the case with some notebook disks. 

Western Digital has put a huge amount of resources into these disks so that the professional end user maintains their dignity at all times without any lapses in redraw. Nothing more frustrating than waiting for a picture to be redrawn and a noisy disk to boot.

Notwithstanding we must also remember that disks of this nature can also be found within Blade Servers, though this is for another outing, but must be highlighted.

Before we go on any further with the dialogue let’s have a few pictures to grasp the fantastic engineering that has gone into this tiny powerful beast.

What's its capacity? According to the stats delivered from Western Digital PR people we see the following maximums can be achieved within each sector.

Up to 91,400 digital photos
Up to 80,000 songs (MP3)
Up to 8,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
Up to 24 hours of Digital Video (DV)
Up to 140 hours of DVD quality video
Up to 38 hours of HD video

Next we briefly look at the claimed power dissipation.

What system did we test this on? Along came a chap from MSI with a GX700 17” notebook, sporting an Intel T8300, 3GB of DDR2 memory, onboard Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT 512MB graphics and loaded in a copy Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium. This nice system should well and truly stretch the Scorpio Black in all aspects. A quick deviation from the topic in question, this certainly is a notebook that catches the eye straight away with its sheen finish.

Software and Benchmarks
Microsoft Vista Home Premium SP1 and complete Updates
PC Vantage Mark
MAXON Cinebench 10
SiSoftware Sandra XII SP2c
HD TACH
HD Tune Professional Ver 3.0

The object of this article is not to test the actual notebook and that must be made abundantly clear from the onset, but the actual hard disk. 

The first Set of Results now gathered are from the elusive Vista score.

What is noticeable is how Vista has rated the primary hard disk coming in at a respectable 5.7 out of 6. This score most certainly puts the Hard Disc up with some of the faster 3.5-inch disks.

We next followed the guidance of the PC Vantage Mark and on a nice clean installation ran the benchmarks.

The ORB returned some interesting scores, though once more up there at the top end is the WD Scorpio Black.   Alongside this result we ran for our own idle curiosity MAXON Cinebench 10 to see if both the system I/O and graphics card could cope with the test.  Surprisingly enough they both did rather well.  For the eagle eyes out there, yes, the OpenGL test results are correct.  What would be interesting is to see is how the whole I/O would cope with an onboard professional graphic card.

Conclusions
The Scorpio Black has most certainly lived up to its claims and Western Digital must be extremely pleased that a hard disk as versatile as this has produced such good results. It most certainly caught us on the hop here with its raw performance. This in turn means that the rugged road warriors and hacks alike should be looking at this currently being their upgrade choice of disk. 

What of the tier one PC firms, system integrators and OEMs? Well, for those trying to move forward the ultimate system this has to be currently the hard disc of choice for the performance notebook. We have consistently demonstrated throughout this article the Scorpio Black has whipped into shape an already fast notebook into a blazingly rapid unit.

Installation of Windows Vista took exactly 29 minutes from the OS DVD disc going in to the desktop finally appearing - this is one of the fastest installs from this operating system we have seen at this level. So the actual write performance is very good indeed in real-time environments.

We have consistently seen read speeds within the upper regions of 65 - 68 MB/s this is a remarkable set of figures. Hard disks of this nature normally struggle to reach 55 MB/s. Western Digital has done its homework in all sectors. What we did importantly find was that using the notebook at performance level found the disk to consume no more power than its predecessor and we got a full two hours working system.   

The temperatures of the disk are respectable for a unit of this nature with such a small area . What must be taken into consideration is that the temperatures seen within the HD Tune Pro benchmark were recorded at the end of the working set of benchmarks and results. So these are very respectable temperatures from a working system of this calibre. As a point of note, ambient average room temperatures were approximately 25.5C

Another important factor is the price of this beastie. At just under $200,  this is a respectable price for a high performance disk of this magnitude.  Western Digital has done its sums right with this spectacular little 2.5-inch disk. X

IT Examiner Score 10 out of 10