Western Digital Scorpio Blue (WD5000BEVT)

We're always amazed at how far hard drive technology has come. Despite being a 2.5in device that can fit into a notebook, the Western Digital Scorpio Blue is reasonably quick and still packs a capacity of 500GB without an accompanying budget-breaking price tag.

We heaped praise on the Scorpio Blue's predecessor, the Scorpio (WD3200BEVT), for its large capacity and competitive pricing, and this model is much the same except on two points: it has more storage space and is even better value.

This notebook drive provides the most storage space a commercial company has so far fitted onto a drive this size. So unless you've got military connections or run a research lab (in which case we'd like to hear from you) this is one of the best solutions you'll find for high-capacity notebook needs.

The standout feature about this drive, especially given how the economy is at the moment, is the relatively low price. With a formatted storage capacity of 465GB and a price tag of $259, the WD has a cost per gigabyte of 55.7 cents. Although this doesn't sound like good value when compared to desktop drives like the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB, each formatted gigabyte costs almost half as much as you'd expect from similar notebook drives such as the Momentus 5400.4 250GB (ST9250827AS).

The Scorpio Blue provides this space by having two 250GB platters. It is a Serial ATA–based drive with a 3 gigabit per second interface, and it has an 8MB cache and spins at 5400rpm.

When transferring 20GB worth of files, the Scorpio recorded read and write speeds of 56.7 megabytes per second and 53.9Mbps, respectively. Although the drive isn't as fast as the Momentus or the Scorpio, it's not far off either, and when transferring data from one location on the drive to another the Scorpio Blue hit 36.2Mbps, which is better than any notebook drive we've tested so far.

Throughout all of these tests and with constant, intensive use, the Scorpio remained cool and quiet, which is good news for users wanting to avoid their notebook becoming a noisy flatiron.