Western Digital
WD2500BeVs scorpio
Western Digital has pulled off a significant
coup with its 250GB Scorpio notebook hard
drive; the device is the current capacity cham-
pion. (Fujitsu has also announced a 250GB
drive but has not shipped it yet.) Packing
250GB into two platters, the areal density of
the Scorpio easily outstrips that of the other
hard drive reviewed here—Seagate’s two-
platter 160GB Momentus drive.
While 250GB isn’t impressive next to
1TB desktop drives, it’s more than enough to
keep most notebook users happy. But to get
that storage, you give up some performance.
Though it didn’t post terrible numbers, the
5,400rpm Scorpio lags behind the 7,200rpm
Momentus. The Scorpio trailed Western
Digital’s drive by up to 22 percent in our
benchmark tests. Access times were also off
by 25 percent against the Momentus due to
the Scorpio’s spindle speeds.
Don’t read this review as too negative
though. The Scorpio isn’t pokey, it’s just that
the Momentus is faster and the
Mtron is in an entirely different
league. But if you crave maxi-
mum capacity from a notebook
drive, the Scorpio has that,
while offering decent perfor-
mance as well.seagate
MoMentus 7200.2
Seagate wasn’t the first to
the 7,200rpm mark, but that
hasn’t stopped it from making
the fastest hard drive around.
The Momentus 7200.2 has a
well-deserved reputation as the
notebook hard-drive perfor-
mance king. What you give up
in space, you gain in speed—
the Momentus easily eclipses
the ginormous Western Digital
Scorpio in read speed, access
time, and all around zippiness.
(Seagate has announced but
not shipped a 200GB version of
this drive.)
Although the Scorpio
didn’t lag too far behind in
average reads, the drive’s
spindle speed kept its access
time about 25 percent
slower than the Momentus’s.
The Momentus also had a
22 percent advantage in
PCMark05’s application tests.
Certain Momentus mod-
els feature a G-Force Protection sensor
that can tell if the drive is in free fall andquickly park the heads to avoid damaging
the drive. While the sexy-fast Mtron SSD
will grab the spotlight, the majority of
folks looking to upgrade their notebooks
will reach for either the Western Digital or
Seagate models.
We lean toward the Seagate Momentus
because of its speed advantage and killer
five-year warranty. Its free-fall sensor also
makes us feel warm and fuzzy about data
integrity and seals the deal.the Momentus’s five-year warranty and speed make it king.$220, http://www.westerndigital.comwestern digital scorpioDaniel johnston
Provides enough space to
rip all your Blu-ray movies.Daniel WeBster^8
Lags in performance; pathetic
one-year warranty.$190, http://www.seagate.comseagate momentushalf japanese
Notebook hard-drive speed
king; sweet warranty.half nelson^9
Needs capacity bump to stay
competitive.
Best scores are bolded. We tested the hard drives using an Asus C90s notebook with a Core 2 Duo E6600, 2GB of RAM and Windows XP.
*The 3.5-inch desktop WD Raptor 150 would not fit inside of our notebook and could not be tested as a host drive.benchMarks
WD 250GB Scorpio SeaGate 160GB WD raptor Mtron
MoMentuS 7200.2 MSD-S25032
HD TacH avg. ReaD (MB/s) 45.5 48.4 75.4 138.1
HD TacH access (Ms) 17.7 14.2 8.2 .1
HD Tune avg ReaD (MB/s) 43.6 49.2 70.9 121.5
HD Tune access (Ms) 17.9 14.7 8.3 .1
PcMaRk05 3,997 4,874 7,266 25,440
PcM XP sTaRTuP (MB/s) 6.3 8.5 11.9 85.5
PcM aPP loaDing (MB/s) 4.8 6.7 11.6 70.2
PcM geneRal usage (MB/s) 3.8 5.2 9.6 52.0
PcM File WRiTe (MB/s) 42.9 47.9 71.3 104.2
PHoTosHoP cs2 (sec) 4:43 4:46 N/A* 4:05
HiBeRnaTe (sec) 12 13 N/A* 12
Wake (sec) 25 25 N/A* 22
BooT (sec) 57 58 N/A* 48holiday 2007 MAXIMUMPC 85