The hard drive was purchased because slowly went out of space on my WD Scorpio Black 320GB. I installed the 640GB drive in a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Notebook. The operating system Linux Debian 6.0 Squeeze is used - a partition for Windows was to test yet set. When you install any of the two operating systems had to suspend anything on the hard drive.
Compared to the Scorpio Black, the Scorpio Blue is much quieter, the drive produced in the notebook no vibrations and is barely perceptible.
The drive comes with a very aggressive power management, with the result that the hard drive often goes off and thus the work is partially interrupted for 1-2 seconds. This condition can be disturbing when liquid is working but fix on Linux with hdparm easy:
hdparm -B 128 / dev / sda
Factory settings are:
/ Dev / sda:
APM_level = 96
To speed there is not much to say. The hard disk reaches the same values as the Scorpio Black 320GB 7200 rpm with me.
Here is an output from hdparm -tT / dev / sda:
/ Dev / sda:
Timing cached reads: 3280 MB in 2:00 seconds = 1641.53 MB / sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 252 MB in 3:02 seconds = 83.58 MB / sec
All in all a good, fast and quiet drive that will do the next year hopefully his services without difficulty.
My conclusion: Fast and silent at the moment are probably only the (still) very expensive SSD hard drives!