Conclusive Thoughts

If you’re using a laptop and have no real limit budget wise, you can go all out and get yourself an Intel X25-M or X25-E Solid State Drive and enjoy 170mb/s write speeds with no defragmentation and 0ms access times.

If however you are more budget wise and want more than a few gigabytes of hard disk space in your laptop you’ll have to look either to entry level SSD which can go up to 128Gb, with pricing still quite high, or go for a high end 2.5” HDD which will have a lot more storage space, but higher access times. This last one we tested today, the Western Digital Scorpio Black is available up to 320Gb and with its 16Mb onboard cache does deliver quite a boost over the default laptop hard drives large OEMs like Dell include with their products.


Funny enough, the Seagate and WD Scorpio score on average the same! The Scorpio Black is a good 35% faster.

If you’re only interested in extra storage, things get a lot more budget friendly, the normal Scorpio from Western Digital costs about half of the Black version, despite its 5400rpm it does keep up with the reference Seagate 2.5” 7200rpm drive we compared it too, quite an impressive feat.

We hope to do a follow-up article in the very near future with some affordable SSD thrown into the mix, to see how things scale from there. Thank you for reading.