The Drive

The Western Digital Scorpio looks just like any 2.5" laptop hard disk, there are no clear cases like the Raptor has, which being a laptop drive would be simply a mute point. The weight of the drive is slightly heavier to hold than our Seagate Momentus 5400.2 drive which is our current laptop test bed. While heavier it feels a lot stronger than the Seagate drive. The metal panels on the WD drive feel more solid in construction, whereas on the Seagate drive we are able to press in a bit on the metal.

The under-belly of the drive is quite neat. In fact there are no circuits, chip or components at all above the surface of the PCB. Western Digital has placed them all on the PCB between the drive casing, keeping things smooth and simple which is especially a good thing in a laptop that may need to have a case around the drive as we don't want short outs.

The drive comes with a massive 8MB of cache memory, one of the largest caches available for the laptop market. While it can't beat the 32MB of the Deskstar 1TB drive, we aren't aiming at the super high-end here.

The interface for the Scorpio has moved form the 44-pin IDE interface we are accustomed to on the 2.5" drives to Serial ATA. Thanks to the smaller nature of Serial ATA data and power cables and the interface on the PCB itself, laptops can be designed with universal fit HDDs that don't need a cradle to install them into the system. The SATA data and power plugs can be incorporated into the motherboard PCB for a slot-in feel. It's simple, effective and eliminates the need for proprietary connectors.