Laptop hard drives haven't experienced the massive capacity upgrades like desktop hard drives have in the past two to three years, but considering the physical size constraints, they really are getting quite "large", too. On the desktop side, 3.5" drives can now be readily sourced at 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB capacities. On the 2.5" side of the market, drives have been slowly progressing to larger capacities and presently top out at 250GB, which happens to be the capacity of the Western Digital Scorpio 2.5" SATA Hard Drive to be reviewed.

Western Digital is a leading manufacturer of computer storage devices, and they have been around since the 1970s. A few weeks ago we published a review of what is now their second largest capacity 3.5" hard drive, the Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB Hard Drive. This review will take a look at their highest capacity 2.5" hard drive, the Western Digital Scorpio 2.5" SATA Hard Drive (model WD2500BEVS), which features a 250GB capacity, 8MB cache memory, and a 5400 RPM rotational speed.

Before getting to the review here are the features and specifications pulled from the Western Digital website.

Features:

Massive capacity - Whether they are in an external drive or a notebook computer, WD's 250 GB 2.5-inch drives offer the most available capacity for space-hungry operating systems like Windows Vista, plus plenty of room left over for photos, music, and video.

Fast and efficient - With 5400 RPM spin speed and 12 ms access time, even the most demanding customer will appreciate the performance achieved by WD Scorpio drives.

Quiet - In a notebook drive, silence is golden. WD's exclusive WhisperDrive combines state-of-the-art seeking algorithms to yield one of the quietest 2.5-inch hard drives on the market. These algorithms also optimize the way a drive seeks for data, which significantly improves power consumption. So now silence (and longer battery life) is golden.

Reliable and Rugged - WD's ShockGuard technology protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks. WD's SecurePark parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface resulting in improved long term reliability due to less head wear, and improved non- operational shock tolerance.

Tested for Compatibility - We perform tests on hundreds of systems and a multitude of platforms in our FIT Lab and Mobile Compatibility Lab to give our customers confidence that our drives will work in their systems.

Ideal for - Portable digital devices of all kinds, including notebook computers, external storage, digital media players, GPS and navigation systems, and other automotive and industrial applications.