Since we don’t do any hardcore specification reviewing here at The Dojo, its difficult for us to review products whose benefits are subjective on many levels. The hard drive is certainly one of the most difficult devices to review since it really just stores data. For a mobile human on the go, however, a large hard drive in the lappy can make a huge difference, and this is where Western Digital’s new Scorpio 320GB 2.5″ SATA drive comes in.

This particular review has two primary components. First is the drive itself. Second is the installation. The first part I can get out of the way quickly. The drive looks like any other standard 2.5″ SATA drive. Made of metal and some plastic. SATA interface on the back. Label on the top. Little hole with a warning not to cover it. Holes for various screws and whatnot. Specification-wise, its a 2.5″ drive with 320GBs of capacity, it runs at 5400RPM, a reasonable 12ms access time, integrated drop protection, and has an 8MB cache.

Getting it into my MacBook Pro was the real task, however. At first, I didn’t have a Torx T-6 screwdriver, so I headed out to MacMall in West LA to pick up a SATA drive enclosure. I selected Macally’s B-S250U USB 2.0 enclosure for which I paid US$22. Not a bad deal. Its sleek and black and it relatively easy to mount the drive in. What I didn’t like, however, was the fact that I had to use two USB ports to use it, one for power and one for the USB connection. That maxed out the ports on my MBP. Thank the gods for Bluetooth mice and keyboards!

With the Scorpio now mounted in the enclosure, I realized that if I could go out and buy an enclosure, I could have just as easily purchased the tools I needed, but I let that wait for the four day weekend over the New Year. I was also a bit miffed at the enclosure’s almost complete lack of static shock protection. Its very dry in Southern California, so its easy to build up a charge. On several occasions a discharge from me caused the drive to be unmounted by Mac OS X. In the three days I kept the Scorpio in the enclosure this happened 5 times. Not good.

Finally, though, I decided to swap out my stock 160GB drive in the MBP for the Scorpio. I swung into Home Depot and picked up one each of Husky’s 8-in-1 Precision Torx and combo Phillips/Flathead drivers for US$12. The extra tips get stored in the handles. Very slick and well made. I settled down at my workbench and prepared for surgery. Unlike the MacBook, the MacBook Pro is not easy to get into to replace the drive. It took me around an hour to complete the entire procedure, removing around 20 screws and pulling off the upper case which holds the keyboard.

Apple has a long history of producing some systems which are easy to work on and many which are downright hostile. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is super easy, the MacBook Pro comes to an 8, so if you are afraid of seeing blood and guts, don’t do this on your own. If you must, and it invalidates the warranty, then use this guide. One note I can make to improve this guide is that you need to remove the screws on both sides of the laptop, not the single side as indicated. Also, the slotlocks on the front of the case top are very difficult to pop off, so be careful. Oh, and get the Spudger!

Once the drive was installed and everything was put back together, my newly storage heavy MBP fired up immediately. I took the opportunity to also install a 2GB SO-DIMM to bump my RAM up to the max of 3GB. Now that all of the hardware was in place, I installed Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” to the new drive. I placed my old 160GB drive into the Macally enclosure to prepare for data transfer. Once OS X was installed and updated, I connected the enclosure and ran the Migration Assistant. It found my account and easily migrated everything over, including applications, settings, and files.

One thing to note, though, is that if you create the exact same account on your new drive as you had on the old one, the Migration Assistant will require you to create a new account into which it will put everything. I’d suggest you create a dummy account which you will later remove. Also, I don’t think the Migration Assistant correctly copied all of my FireFox plug-ins, since my Google stuff isn’t working quite right. Everything else, though, works just fine. I’m quite pleased with how well this built in tool works.

Once that was all done, I got to installing Vista in Boot Camp. Now that I am awash in space I splurged and allocated 80GBs to the Boot Camp partition. This took about 20 minutes to complete. The Vista installation itself only had one problem where it didn’t reboot completely at one point, so I had to power off the system and start it up again, but otherwise, Vista works like Vista (not exactly a shining endorsement). In then installed MacDrive 7 and off I went.

Now that everything is done, I’m pleased to report that the entire procedure was relatively painless, but then I’m speaking from a professional nerds point of view. The good news is that there are plenty of places which will do the installation for you if you can’t or don’t want to. The drive itself, which this review is about, has behaved flawlessly and with good performance. I’m also very pleased to have all of the room I need, though that parameter will likely change soon.

The Western Digital Scorpio 320GB 2.5″ SATA drive, model WD3200BEVT, lists for US$199.99 and is available now direct from the manufacturer and select retailers.

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: hardware, review