Home > Consumer Reviews > Western Digital 640 GB SATA OEM Notebook Hard Drive WD6400BEVT (Scorpio Blue)

QUICK EVALUATION

The Western Digital 640GB 2.5" SATA is a quiet, reliable, easy to install, drive.

The 2.5"/9.5mm SATAs easily and perfectly mount inside a PS3's or laptop's drive bay where they can replace the laptop's or the PS3's original 20-40-60-80-160GB drive or the new PS3 120GB SLIM's without voiding the warranty. Same should hold true for the upcoming PS3's 250GB model. The minor price difference between purchasing a 250GB Slim vs. upgrading an existing 120GB PS3 to 500GB or 640GB should make such an upgrade attractive to anyone who feels that 200-400GB of extra storage are needed.

At the time of this review, the 640GB does not offer the lowest cost per GB - that honor belongs to the 500GB model. I have little doubt that this is bound to change.



POSSIBLE USES

- Upgrade an existing laptop drive. I have upgraded mine from 60GB to a WD 500GB 2.5" SATA recently and I've been happy ever since.

- Upgrade a PS3. I have upgraded my PS3 from 60GB to a WD 320GB more than a year ago and I no longer worry about disk storage limitation. I helped a co-worker upgrade her brand-new 120GB Slim to THIS model about a week ago and it was quick, easy and uneventful - it helps starting with a brand-new PS3 to avoid backup/restore complications.

- Turn it into an external storage drive. It CAN be done by casing it inside an external enclosure and attach it to a computer and having it powered via an USB cable but why bother? Many vendors offer similar capacity external drives at better prices.

It should be noted that there is a bonus involved when upgrading a laptop or a PS3 to a larger HDD - the old drive. I do buy enclosures for those and I tend to use them as backup devices - redundant storage for photos, documents and so on.


MY RATING

I give this HDD its 5 stars for being the largest in it's class 2.5", 9.5mm form factor and for my happy history with WD drives - not one has failed me yet. WD and others do make larger, 1TB 2.5" SATA drives but those come in 12.5mm and will NOT fit inside a PS3 or most existing laptops.

____________________________________

Note:

For anyone new to this who considers upgrading a PS3 (easy) or a laptop (much harder because it involves possibly backup/restore and re-registering the OS with Microsoft), please note that the HDD does NOT look as intimidating as the picture shows. For some reasons, the marketing people decide to almost always show the 'naked' disk - which is the HDD with the enclosure removed. In reality, what you see in this picture is enclosed inside an air-tight, sealed, aluminum capsule and the only things you will be physically interacting are a couple of connectors and a few small screws.

So far, so good with this giant upgrade for what used to be a 40 gig PS3. The upgrade, hardware wise, went off without any hitches. Popping out the original drive is a matter of having a philips head screwdriver handy, and there are no additional cables needed so this OEM drive worked fine. I cannot speak to its reliability yet since it's only been a few days, but there have been no perceived issues with the drive other than having a lot more space to work with.

A word of caution for those using external USB drives to back up the PS3:
I used a standard external USB hard drive to run the Backup application on my PS3, which worked as expected, backing up my mostly filled 40 GB original drive. After I installed the new drive, I was prompted to install the new Playstation OS to continue, and I used the same backup drive to provide the new OS file - DO NOT DO THIS! While this worked, when I walked through the setup, it managed to format my backup in addition to the new drive. Thankfully, I was able to still pop the original drive back in and run the backup again, so all I lost was some time. I would recommend using a separate USB drive for reinstalling the Playstation OS, the file at this point is under 150 megs so it would easily fit on the cheap USB flash drives many of us own. Keeping it away from the backup files would be the best until your PS3 is back up and running on the current OS, then reconnect and run the Backup app to restore your files.

Bought this to have an extra external drive and I was not disappointed. Capacity is great and as usual you can't go wrong with WD quality. I have used their drives for about 20+ years now and have never been disappointed with their quality or customer service. Most RMA's I have done thru them took less than a week from the time I submitted until I had the replacement drive in hand.

Short version: I installed this in my aluminum unibody MacBook. It works fine. I have oodles of free space. It's pretty quiet. At the time, I think it was the largest capacity 9.5mm tall notebook drive available.

Long version:
I didn't really want to upgrade my MacBook. I had plenty of room on the 500GB hard drive I had purchased just 6 months before, also a Western Digital Scorpio Blue, but something was wrong, and I didn't know what. My applications were stalling out after disk intensive operations. I tried re-installing OS X, rebuilding the Spotlight database, fixing permissions, everything and it still happened. So in desperation, I decided to upgrade my hard drive a little early, going up to this 640GB, even though it was the same brand that might have been failing me. And for whatever reason, it's worked reliably ever since.



Remember to de-authorize your iTunes account on the original drive before removing it, and do a final Time Machine backup (assuming you make Time Machine backups) before shutting down.

Anyone who remembers the pain of exchanging the hard drive out of a PowerBook G4 or even a white Intel MacBook, can appreciate the ease involved in swapping hard drives from the unibody line of Apple portables. A latch, 5 screws and an SATA cable are all that stand in your way. You will need a small Phillips head screwdriver and a T6 torx screwdriver. It literally takes 3 minutes to swap the drives. Then you can either rebuild from a Time Machine backup or from the original drive, assuming you have an external hard drive case or a USB to SATA adaptor.

Remember that when you format a MacBook's boot drive with Disk Utility to make sure you are using the GUID option for your journaled HFS+ boot partition. That bit me once on an external drive and it took me 3 reformats to figure out what I was missing.



I chose this drive because it was at the time the highest capacity 9.5mm tall notebook available. There are 12mm tall drives with higher capacity, but those will not fit comfortably in a MacBook. This drive is not going to make you jump around with joy, it stores your data, it's moderately fast for a 5400RPM drive, it is not noisy, and it's comparatively inexpensive. So it's a solid value.

And it prevents me from wasting my time looking for things to throw away. Have you ever spent half an hour throwing away old files to free up 20 cents worth of hard drive space? Our time is too valuable for that. Just get a bigger drive; they are cheap.

I hope this is my last disk base hard drive in my laptop. Solid state drives are rapidly dropping in price, and raising in capacity, and the speed advantage is game changing. Maybe this time next year, I'll make the move. Still this drive has the capacity to keep me going.

This is an economical, high capacity, average performance hard drive. A high performance notebook drive would typically be 7200 RPM, 16MB buffer. This drive can be turned into an external drive for backups etc by simply purchasing an external 2.5" case such as Acomdata Tango 2.5-Inch USB 2.0 eSATA Portable Enclosure for SATA Hard Drive TNGXXXUSE-RED (Red) or you can put your existing notebook hard drive in the 2.5" enclosure and use that as an external drive with the WD6400BEVT as your new main notebook drive. If you are planning on swapping out your main notebook drive, be sure to search for Acronis Migrate Easy software. It's free (trial use) and transfers your entire operating system, applications, and data to the new drive without any problems. Check it out!

Western Digital WD6400BEVT Specifications
Performance Specifications
Rotational Speed 5,400 RPM (nominal)
Buffer Size 8 MB
Average Latency 5.50 ms (nominal)
Seek Times
Read Seek Time 12.0 ms
Track-To-Track SeekTime 2.0 ms (average)
Transfer Rates
Buffer To Host(Serial ATA) 3 Gb/s (Max)

Physical Specifications
Formatted Capacity 640,135 MB
Capacity 640 GB
Interface SATA 3 Gb/s
User Sectors Per Drive 1,250,263,728
Physical Dimensions
English
Height 0.374 Inches
Length 3.94 Inches
Width 2.75 inches
Weight 0.26 Pounds
Metric
Height 9.5 mm
Length 100.2 mm
Width 69.85 mm
Weight 0.117 kg
Environmental Specifications
Acoustics
Idle Mode 24 dBA (average)
Seek Mode 0 26 dBA (average)
Electrical Specifications
Current Requirements
5 VDC
Read/Write 500 mA
Idle 400 mA
Standby 50 mA
Sleep 20 mA
Power Dissipation
Read/Write 2.50 Watts
Idle 0.85 Watts
Standby 0.25 Watts
Sleep 0.10 Watts