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July 19th, 2009 08:00
Western digital Scorpio Black vs Scorpio Blue
really seeking clarification on the difference between the two and as to whether I can fit either to my laptop.
Searching the web seem to indicate that scorpio blue is WD series of hard drives running at 5400 rpm, SATA
whereas Scorpio black is hard drives running at 7200 rpm SATA-II
Laptop is dell e6400 with WD800BEVT fitted which is 80 GB Scorpio blue drive, 5400 rpm SATA
1. firstly can I fit a SATA-II drive? (i.e. laptop supports SATA but will it work with SATA-II)? From what I can tell, both are compatible, SATA being 1.5 Gb/s whereas SATA-II is 3.0 Gb/s .... so unless my laptop can transfer data at 3.0 Gb/s (which it shouldn't since it is SATA), there is no advantage in fitting SATA-II driver, correct or not?
2. will I need to install a driver? - (I am looking at drives from same manufacturer and same model range but larger capacity so that it is plug and play with nothng else required).
3. Finally having faster spinning drive, 7200 vs 5400 as well as increase in cache, 8 mb vs 16 Mb - is that gonna be a benefit or is the data transfer bottleneck elsewhere?
any other advice muchly appreciated.
thanks.
ejn63
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July 19th, 2009 10:00
1. Yes. However, since the drive spins at no more than 7200 rpm, don't expect anywhere near 3.0 G/sec -- even a 7200 rpm drive will run at around 70 MBps, or about half what SATA 150 can sustain.
2. No.
3. The Black drive should be faster than the blue - but still, you won't see any difference between SATA 150 and SATA 3.0G. SATA 3.0G is yet another interface that proposes to solve a performance issue that doesn't exist. In all cases the speed limit is the rate at which data spins off the platter - not the rate at which the interface delivers data to the system.
02GF74
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July 19th, 2009 13:00
cheers for that.:emotion-2:
so to recap, neither drive is capable of transferring data that is close to SATA limit, but the black drive in theory should be about 33 % than blue.... just need to decide is a 50% increase in price is worht 33 % potential performance increase ..... hmmmmm ....:emotion-40: