HotHardware reports that when it comes to notebook hard drives you almost can’t get enough of two things, capacity and speed, and that although SSDs (Solid State Drives) definitely address the speed issue, they only exacerbate the capacity issue (at least currently). Not to mention, the higher you go up in capacity with SSDs, into the 256GB range especially, costs scale upward in multiples of their standard spinning media-based counterparts
Meanwhile, bellwether hard drive manufacturers like Western Digital continue to drive rotational media storage technologies further to improve both capacity and speed, as well as drive cost structures downward, and recently, WD sent HotHardware their fastest 7200 RPM 500GB notebook drive, so they decided to take the opportunity to do a little A/B comparison in performance. The new WD Scorpio Black 500GB 2.5-inch notebook hard drive weighs in at half the price ($76 at Amazon) of Seagate’s Momentus XT, and does a fairly good job of hanging with it, from a performance standpoint
