The Basics:
There generally isn't much to talk about when discussing the physical features of a hard drive, and there is even less to discuss on this review sample since it is provided as a bare drive. The below left image shows the top of the 320GB Scorpio, which is well covered with product information, regulatory markings, and other bits of data which are probably of minimal interest to most users.
The above right image shows the bottom of the drive, as well as the SATA data and power connections at one end. The PCB may not be all that exciting, but I like to check them out to see how they are laid out. I prefer designs like this where the various chips and other features are mounted on the inside, as I have killed other drives (
with layouts like this) in the past because little chips have gotten bumped, or exposed connections have shorted out.
Test Setup:
A few synthetic and real world tests were conducted on the
Western Digital 320GB 2.5" SATA Hard Drive, using a test system with the following key components:
» Intel D840 3.2GHz Dual Core processor
» ABIT AW8D motherboard
» 2x 1GB
OCZ Technology PC2-6400 System Elite Dual Channel DDR2 memory
» 1x
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB hard drive
» Windows XP Professional operating system (current)
While 2.5" drives are obviously intended for notebook computers, the system as described above has been used as the default test bed for all similar drives over the past year or so. In addition to having history with four other 2.5" drives, there are also multiple SATA connections to facilitate testing, which the typical notebook computer just wouldn't offer.
The following 2.5" drives will be compared to the 320GB Scorpio:
»
Western Digital Scorpio 250GB SATA 1.5Gbps hard drive
»
Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160GB SATA 3Gbps hard drive
»
160GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3 PATA hard drive
»
120GB Seagate Momentus 5400.2 PATA hard drive
And the following list details the tests to be executed on all drives:
» HD Tach 3.0.1.0 RW (Long Benchmark)
» SiSoft Sandra XI SP1 (Physical Disks Benchmark)
» Real World Data Transfers
» Thermal Testing
