Western Digital Scorpio Black 750GB 2.5" Hard Drive Review

Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these hard drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture.

We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and this goes double for SSD based drives. The main reason we include it is to show what under perfect conditions a given drive is capable of; but the more important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.


It really is amazing to see a “laptop” hard drive post an average speed this good. Those ultra dense platters, coupled a more efficient 4K data layout does make for one very impressive 2.5” product.

Write Performance

For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.



If we thought the sequential read numbers were good, the numbers the WD Scorpio Black 750GB hard drive posted in the write test were simply jaw dropping. This drive’s write numbers stay above 100MB/s to past the 375GB mark and really don’t go seriously into the upper 90s until 450GB point.

Let’s face it; up until the advent of SSDs, a “laptop” drive was considered an inferior compared to its 3.5” brethren and a certain amount of “lowered expectations” had to be taken into consideration. After all, a 2.5” drive that is meant to be low noise, low power usually resulted in drastically lower performance numbers. Well that has certainly changed since the Scorpio 750GB decimated previous Black drives and the best the competition has to offer as its average is about 19MB/s higher than the Momentus XT.