Western Digital Wd Scorpio Blue 500Gb 5400Rpm Sataii 7Pin 8Mb Buffer 2.5Inch Mobile Hard Drive

Pros: Quiet, fast, low power. Basically better in every spec than the two-platter, 9mm, 500GB Scorpio Blue. Low profile is probably a plus, but didn't matter for my Mac.

Cons: Clunk, clunk, clunk. The spindown time defaults to around 1 second. OS X does not reset it when you tell it not to spin down the drives when idle. Search "hdapm" for the fix. Linux has this built in (hdparm?).

Overall Review: None

Pros: It works and it's cheap. For the price, capacity, and the physical format (7 mm thick) it's a pretty good deal. There is a single, important caveat however.

Cons: The Intellipark "feature" that this drive comes with causes the drive to spin down every 4 seconds. This means that the GUI hangs, videos stutter, music skips. Every 4 seconds, like clockwork. Just imagine that for a second.... borderline unusable.

This affected debian, ubuntu, and Mac OS X. The problem manifested as a loud periodic clicking noise every 4 seconds, followed by extremely high latency (~800 ms) as the drive spins back up. Not only was this somewhat irritating, but I suspect it caused greatly increased power consumption and would have shortened the life of the drive dramatically (mechanical wear and tear).

I managed to disable it, with a somewhat sketchy utility supplied by WD, that only runs in DOS. I mean, I eventually got it working, but only after spending 2-3 hours of my time on this problem. If you buy this drive, you should factor that into your decision.

In the future, I'm probably more inclined to get a drive without this type of power management. The problem essentially is, if the operating system can't coordinate power management with the HDD firmware, you're likely to end up with poor results. I mean, if the OS thinks that it's a good idea to spin down, then it probably is. On the other hand, the firmware on the HDD has no idea what demands are coming down the line. The only possible thing it can do, is spin down after a set period of inactivity, which is bound to yield poor results.

Overall Review: I understand where WD is coming from here. They're trying to make the drive nominally more efficient. However, the way they're going about it, by enabling overly aggressive power management on the firmware level, gives me the impression that Western Digital is trying to inflate their efficiency figures, at the expense of usability.