Western Digital Scorpio Black (WD5000BEKT) hard drive
WD's Scorpio Black (WD5000BEKT) is a well-performing notebook hard drive with a great price
23/08/10
The Western Digital Scorpio Black (WD5000BEKT) is a high-performance 2.5in notebook drive boasting a 7200rpm spin speed, 16MB of cache memory, a SATA 3 GB/s interface and 500GB of storage space. It will suit IT professionals, multimedia enthusiasts and anyone who craves more speed from their laptop.
With an RRP of just $99, the Western Digital Scorpio Black (WD5000BEKT) represents excellent value for money. That works out at around 20 cents per gigabyte. When you consider that the drive has a 7200rpm spin speed, the low price-point is doubly impressive. It also comes with a generous five-year warranty.
According to Western Digital, the Scorpio Black (WD5000BEKT) has power consumption equivalent to a 5400rpm drive. (This means the extra speed shouldn't drain your notebook's battery life.) If you're conscious about protecting your data, you might also want to look at the Western Digital Scorpio Black (WD3200BJKT), which adds a free-fall motion sensor.
To test the WD Scorpio Black (WD5000BEKT)'s file transfer speeds, we copied files back and forth between the drive and our testbed equipped with a 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor drive. We also copied the folders from one location on the Scorpio Black 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 internal hard drives on the market:
| Small File (3GB) Transfer Test Results | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Price | Storage Capacity | Read speed (MBps) |
Write speed (MBps) |
Read/write speed (MBps) | |||
| WD Scorpio Black (WD5000BEKT) | $159 | 500GB | 50 | 40 | 32.6 | |||
| Seagate Momentus 7200.4 HDD | $217 | 500GB | 85.99 | 77.2 | 25.63 | |||
| WD Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT | $159 | 750GB | 60 | 34.4 | 20.2 | |||
| Western Digital Caviar Black (WD2001FASS) | $309 | 64GB | 50 | 36.1 | 37.5 | |||
| Solidata K5-32 SSD | $359 | 32GB | 50.6 | 34.1 | 26.8 | |||
| Kingston SSDNow V+ SSD | $445 | 64GB | 49.2 | 50 | 56.6 | |||
| Kingston SSDNow M Series | $855 | 80GB | 49.2 | 50 | 56.6 | |||
| Intel X25-M SSD | N/A | 80GB | 49.2 | 49.2 | 66.7 | |||
| Large File (20GB) Transfer Test Results | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Price | Storage Capacity | Read speed (MBps) |
Write speed (MBps) |
Read/write speed (MBps) | |||
| WD Scorpio Black (WD5000BEKT) | $399 | 500GB | 62 | 75.75 | 32.2 | |||
| WD Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT | $389 | 2TB | 49.2 | 66.5 | 53.8 | |||
| Seagate Momentus 7200.4 HDD | $217 | 500GB | 85.99 | 77.2 | 25.63 | |||
| WD Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT | $159 | 750GB | 60 | 34.4 | 20.2 | |||
| Solidata K5-32 SSD | $359 | 32GB | 76.9 | 42.4 | 37.1 | |||
| Kingston SSDNow V+ SSD | $445 | 64GB | 76.6 | 77.29 | 75.2 | |||
| Kingston SSDNow M Series | $855 | 80GB | 73.09 | 71.04 | 52.49 | |||
| Intel X25-M SSD | N/A | 80GB | 76.1 | 74 | 87.8 | |||
When it came to reading and writing small file sizes, the Western Digital Scorpio Black (WD5000BEKT) performed adequately. The results were more impressive in our 20GB file transfer tests. It trounced the WD Scorpio Blue WD7500BPVT , particularly when it came to read/write speeds. This is good news if you plan to store a lot of high-definition videos or movies.
During operation, the Western Digital Scorpio Black (WD5000BEKT) was reasonably quiet. It also remained cool to the touch throughout testing.
According to WD's environment policy, "All of our manufacturing facilities in Asia have environmental management systems in place which are ISO 14001 certified. Each facility has a comprehensive policy and set of supporting procedures addressing environmental permits, pollution prevention, hazardous substances, wastewater and solid wastes, airborne emissions and product content." The Global Citizenship section of the company's Web site provides details on its environmental efforts, including a Q&A on how it deals with hazardous materials and a report on greenhouse gas emissions (PDF).
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Pros
- Excellent value for money, 7200rpm spin speed, quiet during operation
Cons
- Slightly slow at transferring smaller files
Bottom Line
The Western Digital Scorpio Black (WD5000BEKT) is a high-performance hard drive for data-hoarders on the go. It strikes a great balance between affordability, capacity and speedy read/write speeds.