WD Scorpio Blue 1TB (WD10JPVT) Review

The hard drive market has turned volatile, ever since the floods wreaked havoc in Thailand. Factories of major hard drive brands were shut and operations were hit, resulting in a major hike in the prices of hard drives, around the world. Demand has been high, as always and supply seems to be suffering. In the midst of all this, companies continue to sell hard drives and those who really need the capacity have no choice, but to pay for hard drives. For notebook users, there’s always a premium that they need to pay over standard 3.5-inch format desktop drives. So today we’re looking at WD’s 1TB Scorpio Blue drive for notebooks.

Features and design

The Blue line of hard drives in WD’s portfolio offer the best of both worlds - performance and economy. The WD10JPVT is a 1TB drive operating at a speed of 5400rpm, slower than the Black series of drives that run at 7200rpm. They’re built with 8 MB of cache, as compared to the 16 MB of cache that’s present on a Scorpio Black drive.

Part of the Blue series from the WD Scorpio line

WD doesn’t have a Scorpio Green lineup, like the Caviar Green series for desktops. The WD10JPVT is based on the older SATA2 3Gbps interface. Still, for a notebook hard drive, it shouldn’t act as a bottleneck. WD rates the drive to operate at 1.4W, while reading and writing - this drops to 0.59 watts on idle. 

Designed for performance notebooks

In terms of design, it’s like any other conventional 2.5-inch drive, out there - except, this one has the Scorpio Blue branding on the top. It has a thickness of 9.5mm and it weighs just 0.11kg - light in comparison to a standard 3.5-inch desktop drive. The WD10JPVT, as per statistics is one of the fastest in the Scorpio Blue line-up. A hard drive, such as this would ideally end up in a powerful notebook or inside an external hard drive casing.

Performance

The Scorpio Blue 1TB WD10JPVT was put through its paces with our usual set of benchmarks. We started it off with a barrage of synthetic tests, such as HD Tach and SiSoft Sandra. Eventually, we ran a set of real world tests that would help us determine the performance of the drive in everyday usage scenarios. The test system configuration we used is mentioned below.

Cache lowered to 8 MB in place of the 16 MB on the Black series

Test rig configuration:

Processor: Intel Core i7-3960X

Motherboard: ASUS Sabertooth X79

Memory: Kingston HyperX 8GB DDR3 (4 x 2 GB)

Hard drive: WD Velociraptor  300 GB

GPU: AMD Radeon HD6970

PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro 1000W

The WD10JPVT is quite impressive, when it comes to performance. It’s able to match the performance of most value drives on the desktop front. For example, a read speed of 90.35 MB/s in a synthetic test is pretty good for a drive, but a speed of 88.08 MB/s in a real world test is almost identical and is pretty fast for a notebook drive. Sure, a Caviar Black will be easily able to handle these kinds of numbers, considering the larger cache and faster spindle speeds. 

A good performance, but pricing ought to be lower

Write speeds end up being even more impressive, as they cross the 115 MB/s mark for sequential data, assorted data speeds suffer in comparison, serving speeds of just 80.66 MB/s. Read speeds in general were slower than write speeds. The biggest hit, like on most drives is when you try and dump large amounts of data between two partitions. In such a scenario, the head on the drive has to read and write data on different locations. The performance in such cases, plummets to some 28.84 MB/s in the case of sequential data and 27.49 MB/s for the assorted data set. 

Verdict

The WD Scorpio Blue 1TB (WD10JPVT) sells for a price of Rs.10,650, which is higher than a 3.5-inch drive as expected, but it’s also a fair bit more than what standard 2.5-inch drives used to sell at. It’s also much faster than some of the other 2.5-inch drives we’ve tested in the past. Still, if you’re in the market for an efficient, yet performing drive, no matter what the price is, then the WD10JPVT should suit you well.