Top Notebook Drive Battle: Seagate versus Western Digital at 750GB

In a world of ever increasing hard drive sizes on the desktop, most laptop consumers still find themselves being limited to laptop drives no bigger than 640GB. Vast majority of laptop vendors don't include large capacity drives with their laptops unless they are customized that way online. As a result, many people end up finding themselves wanting to upgrade to a bigger and more importantly, faster drive.

Users with larger pocketbooks can take the SSD route and get a nice SSD to improve performance - while still taking a hit on capacity. If an increase of capacity and performance are what you’re looking for then you’d likely want to look to a 500GB or larger HDD. Right now, laptop drives go all the way up to 1TB but in many cases those drives are fairly slow - spinning at 5400rpm or less. This is where the 750GB drives come in, both Seagate and Western Digital have 750GB offerings spinning at 7200rpm, i.e. desktop speeds.

The combination of 750GB Capacity, 16MB of cache and 7200rpm properly fills the need for upgrading a laptop hard drive.  As a result, we will be looking at today which of these two manufacturers’ drives is the fastest as well as which is the best value.

Specs and Background Data
Specifications wise, both drives seem very similar. Both are 2.5" laptop drives that utilize the SATA 3.0Gbps interface, and both drives are 7200RPMs with 16MB of cache. In that sense, both these drives appear to be the same on paper. This is why we chose to compare these two drives side by side to give them a fair comparison. Both the Western Digital Scorpio Black and the Seagate Momentus are very comparable and both companies sent us their drives at around the same time.

Here we have a few snapshots of both HDDs top and bottom, they really aren’t anything special to look at but they are thin and fast.

The duel of Three Quarter TeraByte chargers: Seagate Momentus versus Western Digital Scorpio Black Edition

Nothing special on the back: On the left, Seagate Momentus. On the right: WD Scorpio Black. Do note that both laptop drives protect their electronics by putting the silicon chips on the inside