Western Digital Scorpio Black 750GB

Western Digital Scorpio Black 750GB review

Western Digital's Scorpio Black 750GB notebook drive is another in the recent spurt of high-capacity laptop HDDs such as the Toshiba MK7559GSXP and Toshiba MK1059GSM.But if you want to get a faster hard drive for your notebook, which route do you go down? There are compromises to be made… Do you sacrifice capacity for out and out performance? An SSD is the obvious choice if so.But what about large capacity and performance? Unless you have very deep pockets, a high-cap SSD is out of the question. So you're left with no other choice than a mechanical drive, which in the case of a notebook drive usually means a spin speed of 5,400rpm.Hardly going to set the world on fire, right?Well Western Digital may just have the answer in the form of the WD7500BPKT. The latest member of the Scorpio Black family combines a hefty 750GB capacity with a none too sluggish 7,200rpm spin speed, and all for well under a hundred quid. A bit of a bargain, we think. Both Western Digital's WD WD7500BPKT Scorpio Black and Toshiba's MK7559GSXP share the same 750GB capacity and Advanced Sector Formatting (ASF) technology. But the Scorpio Black has a spin speed of 7,200rpm and 16MB of cache. Compared to the Toshiba's 5,400rpm spin speed and just 8MB cache, the Scorpio Black has much better burst speed performance.