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.