Optibay - Scorpio Black or Blue?

[rev.b]

I have a Scorpio Black WD7500BPKT on my optibay and I like it a lot.
It's very quiet, no vibrations at all, and very fast (for a hdd, that is... 😀), as you can confirm with several online reviews.
If you see its specs, the difference in power consumption for the 750 Gb Scorpio Blue is negligible.

If cost is no object, and drive sizes are the same, I can't think of a reason to get the 5400 rpm instead.

 

[Rizvi1]

I would advise you to wait.
Buy an SSD + the an ebay optibay now but wait with buying the HDD.
Due to the Thailand flooding HDD prices are still very high. If you don't need the space right now. Wait another 2 months for prices to get back to what they used to be. Just use the current too small HDD in the main bay and install a SSD. Upgrade the HDD later.

I personally would always go for a 5400rpm drive if there is an SSD as a system drive planned. 7200rpm only if it is the system drive too.
I think it is too loud and for the stuff one usually stores on the secondary data drive random access is entirely unimportant for movies, music, images, other big files, backups all that matters is squential read/write and in that respect the higher density 5400rpm drives are equally fast. Density makes up for the slower spinning and 7200rpm drives are always a lot more noisy and sometimes they add vibration which is really bad imo. 5400rpm usually have never any noticeable vibrations.

With an SSD definitely go Scorpio blue or Samsung M8 but wait if you can.
Unless you mean to use the HDD for a system drive, which I wouldn't advise. Would be a waste to buy the SSD in such a case.

Some Tests
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_scorpio_black_500gb_review_wd5000bekt
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_scorpio_blue_1tb_review_wd10jpvt
http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_momentus_750gb_review_st9750420as
And for 95-99% of all use cases of data drives the only metric that matters is squential read/write. Everything else won't result in any noticable difference.

Thanks for the reply. I read through the 750GB or 1TB hard drive? thread and it seemed most weren't dealing with the Vibration or lower battery life issue. Another reason for going w/ the Scorpio Black was the cheaper price. It seems to be half the price right no ($120 at Office Depot) of the 1 TB Scorpio Blue.

I could do the SSD right now but I need more time to figure out a good SSD, the Tools/Accessories I need, and the procedure of install and configuration for having this SSD/HDD set up.

 

[m021478]

I already have a 500GB SSD from Apple as my boot drive, and I am now looking to add 1TB internal storage space in my Macbook... however, I also want to minimize the hit my battery takes and keep the overall heat of the Macbook to a minimum.

Would the OWC Data Doubler + 1.0TB WD 5200RPM Scorpio Hard Drive Bundle be the best option for me, or is there a better approach?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated... Thanks!

 

[happle]

the seagate momentus 7200 rpm drives are very quiet and cool. no complaints here. my other choice would have been the black tho.

 

[Mersailios]

While I can't speak for how it works in the optical bay I can tell you that overall the Western Digital Scorpio Black is an excellent disk drive.

I installed one in my MacBook Pro as the primary hard disk (a WD5000BPKT to be precise) and it's extremely fast, with AJA System Test reporting read/write speeds of ~110MB/s, it's silent and produces no vibration, and it hasn't noticibly impacted my battery life. Highly recommended.