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WD Scorpio Blue 500GB (wd5000bevt) - anyone with this hard drive?

H

helix21

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 25, 2009
296
57
I am looking for advice on the wd5000bevt (500GB 5400rpm)

Planning to get this as it supposedly has almost the same speed as a 320GB 7200rpm drive and doesnt come with the usual 7200rpm negetives (heat, vibrations and noise).

Anyone with firsthand experience with this drive? It is quite popular so I am hoping I will find someone :)

Also, I heard something about clashing motion sensor because the macbook already have one so you should avoid some drives. Does this drive have one? Is it compatible?

Thanks for the help :)
 
Yes, I have it

It is a great drive

If you search with MRoogle you will find a lot of information on this drive here

Woof, Woof - Dawg
pawprint.gif
 
MacDawg said:
Yes, I have it

It is a great drive

If you search with MRoogle you will find a lot of information on this drive here

Woof, Woof - Dawg
pawprint.gif
Click to expand...

Brilliant! No conflict with the motion sensor/accelerometer then?

I did search at first, honest. Found it quite nice to compare to the seagate with 320GB 7200rpm but apparently seagate are heaving reliability issues. Which pops up an issue - how long is the guarantee on these things?
 
Got it during a vacation when I ran out of space to store photo's I made on my stock 80GB HDD (some sort of Hitachi 5400rpm disk) in my White MacBook :p Replaced it while drinking tea in some sort of cafe, works great. No problems, more space.
To be honest I really didn't notice any performance differences with my stock HDD, but it certainly is a hell of a lot bigger. :)
All in all: It's not expensive and works great, nothing wrong with it!
 
helix21 said:
Brilliant! No conflict with the motion sensor/accelerometer then?

I did search at first, honest. Found it quite nice to compare to the seagate with 320GB 7200rpm but apparently seagate are heaving reliability issues. Which pops up an issue - how long is the guarantee on these things?
Click to expand...

The WD blue drives do not have a free fall sensor. I would expect the unit to withstand a much lower opperating shock without failure but it shouldn't cause any firmware related conflicts with what's in the MBP.

The black series drives come with and without a sensor. The BJKT drives have one and the BEKT drives do not.
 
I am using one without a problem as well. (Santa-Rosa 15")

I bought it soon after they have become available (almost a year now, is it?), loving the big capacity ever since.

I am thinking about moving up to a 7200rpm drive with my upcoming (!!) Arrandale update but I'm worried about noise. I had an old Toshiba with a 7200 drive and man, was it loud! (I believe it was a Hitachi)
 
helix21 said:
how long is the guarantee on these things?
Click to expand...

I have 4 of these drives, one in a MBP, one in a Mini, and two in external enclosures. The drive in the MBP failed with ever increasing bad blocks after <3 months. It was replaced under warranty without hassle. It is my recommendation that if you choose to put in a big drive, run a surface scan on it before using it to detect and map out the bad blocks, and back up regularly. I use the drives in the external enclosures as backups via Carbon Copy Cloner. If a drive fails, I can swap in the backup an 20 minutes or less.
 
helix21 said:
I am looking for advice on the wd5000bevt (500GB 5400rpm)

Planning to get this as it supposedly has almost the same speed as a 320GB 7200rpm drive and doesnt come with the usual 7200rpm negetives (heat, vibrations and noise).

Anyone with firsthand experience with this drive? It is quite popular so I am hoping I will find someone :)

Also, I heard something about clashing motion sensor because the macbook already have one so you should avoid some drives. Does this drive have one? Is it compatible?

Thanks for the help :)
Click to expand...

I have it, it's very good but a bit noisy and I had to use HDAPM to sort out the constant stuttering. Honestly, I'd go for the Hitachi equivalent if I were to do it again.

Battery life seems to be unaffected too as a bonus.
 
jamesraward said:
I have it, it's very good but a bit noisy and I had to use HDAPM to sort out the constant stuttering. Honestly, I'd go for the Hitachi equivalent if I were to do it again.

Battery life seems to be unaffected too as a bonus.
Click to expand...


Yeah, the HDAPM trick seem so to have sorted out things for me finally as well with my Scoprio Blue but overall I am not impressed. It's slower than my original 250gb. I get beachballs now whenever I launch programs, albeit slight. I also seem to be getting a some page outs now where I never got any before with my original drive. Think I am going to keep it for a backup drive and get the new Hitachi.
 
mikes70mustang said:
Its got 140 GB more and is more expensive:D
Click to expand...

Eh, depends on where you look. its been ranging between 99 ~ 109 and thats not a bad deal at all considering it used to be at 169$ no more than 2 months ago.
while the 500 is around 79 ~ 94 still.

elpmas said:
how does the 640gb wd 5400 compare to the 500gb wd 5400?
Click to expand...

i like it, just as silent and works fine, no heat issues at all. and i have both.
 
I bought one a month ago and LOVE it. I got it for ~$80 with shipping, and stayed away from the 640Gb drive as it was more $/Gb, and I didn't need THAT much space. My Read/Write times tripled from that of the stock 5400RPM 120Gb Drive in my Late 2006 MB. I'm getting ~50-60Mb/s as oppose to 10-20Mb/s on my stock drive.

As always, back up. Not having a back up nowadays is silly given how cheap they are, and how simply you can prevent a hardware failure from wrecking havoc on years of data.
 
Now that the 640 is hardly 20 euros more expensive than the 500 I am torn between the two. The 640 is denser so it should have a small performance advantage.
 
Mine is silent

I have 2 of these, and both are quiet. No clicking or noticeable vibration, almost as fast as my 310gb 7200 black scorpion, which vibrates terribly. Neither of my drives makes any clicking sounds, and I have not tried HDAPM because I don't need it. I think the noisy drives may be defective.
 
I bought this drive a few months ago when I bought my MBP. I have nothing but good things to say about it. Not that I had any problems with my previous drive (Other than capacity). The drive is fast, reliable, quiet, no vibration, huge capacity, reasonably priced, name brand. I dont know, I just havent seen any cons with it.
 
I just replaced my 160 gb on my 13" MBP with this wd scorpio blue 500 and its giving me some problems. I used carbon cloner to copy my old hard drive into this
1st - boot up times are considerably slower. The computer stays on the white screen for almost 20 sec before it shows the apple logo (sort of like the problem with the new imac)

2 - I was expecting it to be faster but it is not faster than the stock hard drive (not to say slower some times)

Is there anything i can do to it to fix these problems and improve the boot up time , like some sort of optimization or something. Please help..
 
gwerhart0800 said:
I have 4 of these drives, one in a MBP, one in a Mini, and two in external enclosures. The drive in the MBP failed with ever increasing bad blocks after <3 months. It was replaced under warranty without hassle. It is my recommendation that if you choose to put in a big drive, run a surface scan on it before using it to detect and map out the bad blocks, and back up regularly. I use the drives in the external enclosures as backups via Carbon Copy Cloner. If a drive fails, I can swap in the backup an 20 minutes or less.
Click to expand...

can you elaborate on "run a surface scan"? is this something you can do in disk utility, should I download another program to do it...? Just "verify disk"? (I just ordered the 640gb from newegg, shipped this morning!)

thanks!
 
Great drive

I bought this drive for a MBP 13"unibody and actually returned the 13" for a 15" with a 500GB HD, then wound up purchasing a unibody white MB and installed the WD Scorpio Blue before even booting up. This drive works great, no noise and no compatibility problems.
 
WD Scorpio Blue 500GB is incredible!

This is a great drive. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I've done all the research and found it to be the best choice for MBP's. In my case, I installed it in a late 09 15" MBP and the experience has been nothing but positive. The drive is FAST, super quiet, and absolutely NO vibration! Why do I mention this you may ask? Well, let's just say that I had my fair share the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB 2.5" HDD and it was the WORST experience that I ever had. I ordered a custom MBP and opted with the Segate 7200.4 thinking it would provide excellent performance. Well to be quite honest, I wasn't impressed at all. The drive VIBRATES and PULSATES all the time at very noticeable levels. I had is replaced by the Genius bar 3 times and all 3 Seagate HDD's exhibited the same irritating behavior. After 3 tries, I decided to do some extensive research and as it turns out the WD Blue Scorpio has equal and if not better performance stats than the Seagate. In my opinion, there's a reason why WD doesn't make a 7200 RPM drive greater than 320GB, because 500 creates too much vibration to the point that it will drive a consumer crazy and limit the MTTF of the drive. Do yourself a favor, bypass the Seagate drive it's not worth it...
 
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