Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB (WD10JPVT)

Western Digital has had a 1TB (1,000GB) hard disk in its 2.5in (laptop-sized) Scorpio Blue range for a while now (that's the WD10TPVT), so you may be asking yourself what's so special about the WD10JPVT apart from the changing of a letter in the model name.

In fact, the letter change may seem insignificant but it indicates a huge change inside the disk. The previous WD10TPVT model used three platters (disks) to achieve its 1TB capacity while the newer version uses just two platters to get to the same storage level.

It also gets a bump in spindle speed which increases from 5,200rpm to 5,400rpm and it retains the 8MB buffer (cache) and SATA 3Gbits/sec interface of the previous disk, all of which put it firmly in the mainstream in terms of price.

So how has Western Digital managed to cram 500GB of storage space into a single disk platter? It's down to something called Advanced Formatting Technology (AFT), which allows greater data density than the previous ‘legacy formatting'.

Another benefit from the drop down from three disks to two is that this model now comes in a shorter enclosure (9.5mm compared to its predecessor's 12.5mm), which means it will now fit most notebook computers although it's also ideal for a very small-format PC such as a home entertainment computer in which this much storage in a small space will be very welcome.

When it comes to performance, the WD10JPVT does a little better than its mainstream credentials might otherwise suggest. When benchmarked with HDTach it produced a burst speed of 189MBytes/sec and the ATTO benchmark produced sequential read/write scores of 93MBytes/sec and 94MBytes/sec respectively.

Meanwhile back in the real world, we attached the WD10JPVT to our test rig and it took 55 seconds to boot from a cold start into Windows 7 Ultimate. That kind of speed isn't up to solid-state disk (SSD) standards but it's impressive for a disk of this kind.

Similarly, when transferring a large folder of mixed files the WD10JPVT was surprisingly quick, taking 135 seconds to transfer 5GB of data.