Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT hard drive

The Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT is a 2.5in internal SATA II hard drive suitable for notebooks, media players and other portable devices. It boasts a roomy 750GB capacity (a 1TB version is also available), a 5400rpm spin speed and 8MB of cache.

The WD Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT wedges two 375GB platters together. Despite this, it remains a cool and impressively quiet performer. With an RRP of $159 (around 21 cents per gigabyte), it’s also very reasonably priced.

The WD7500BPVT is compatible with standard 9.5mm notebook hard drive bays. This means it will fit in almost any laptop — in the past, most high-capacity drives were suitable for desktop replacement notebooks only. If you require lots of storage space while on the road (and would prefer not to lug an external hard drive around), the Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT is a compelling choice.

To test the WD Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT’s file transfer speeds, we copied files back and forth between the drive and our 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor system testbed. We also copied the folders from one location on the Scorpio Blue to another to test its speed when simultaneously reading and writing files. Each test folder contained a variety of files adding up to 3GB and 19.2GB, respectively.

Let’s take a look at how it compared to other external hard drives on the market:

As you can see, the WD Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT led the charge in our read tests, trumping the other contenders. However, it proved a bit sluggish in our read/write tests, and its write speeds were around average. Nonetheless, these are impressive results for a 5400rpm notebook hard drive.

The WD Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT remained quite cool during operation and it barely raised a purr. This is an important consideration for a notebook drive, as any sound emitted is usually noticeable. All in all, we were very pleased with the Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT — it has plenty of storage, is reasonably fast and runs reliably.

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