11. Western Digital Scorpio WD800VE

Western Digital has finally recognized the importance of entering the notebook hard drive market. There are two main reasons for this. First, the mobile market is growing faster than the desktop market. Second, more and more enterprise class drives will slowly be transitioned to the 2.5" form factor. Seagate already presented its Savvio drive and we expect other manufacturers to follow suit rather soon.

WD's entry at a maximum drive capacity of 80 GB and 5,400 RPM can be considered solid, but not too aggressive. Western Digital should thus be able to score good sales from those interested in performance while collecting experience in this market area. Maybe we will see a high-end notebook drive soon, since Western Digital today offers the fastest 3.5" desktop drive, the Raptor at 10,000 RPM.

The name "Scorpio" conveys the same aggressive tone as "Raptor" and seems appropriate for the new WD800VE, since the drive scores rather good results in many benchmarks. Seagate and WD fight a neck-and-neck race in the IOMeter suite, while the Scorpio beats the Momentus 5400.2 in Winbench 99 2.0. In terms of access time, it trails Seagate's 17 ms by only 1 ms. At minimum transfer rates of 18.3 MB/s, the Scorpio is able to sustain better minimum transfer performance than most other 5,400 RPM drives, too.