This is Western Digital’s 250GB 2.5” WD2500BEVS, and even though it’s built for use in laptops, it still uses the same SATA connectors as regular 3.5” SATA drives, meaning there’s nothing stopping you from using one in any other style of computer. Shuttle boxes, media centre PCs and Mini ITX based computers, for instance, would be worthy recipients.

You will be left with 232.88 of the unformatted 250GB capacity after formatting to NTFS. It supports SATA 1 only, which limits the drive to a top speed of 1.5Gb/s. This is not a problem, as after three averaged tests under HD Tach we found that the drive’s maximum burst speed was only 124.93 MB/s; a speed which will rarely if ever be achieved in the real world.

More useful than this are the average read speeds, which over the course of three tests averaged 44.13MB/s. This places it roughly on par with most desktop drives, even though the Western Digital 250GB laptop drive runs at 5400RPM as opposed to the 7200RPM 3.5” drives used in almost every desktop computer today. This speed can be explained by the drive’s use of perpendicular magnetic recording -- a technology that doubles the data density of the platters and thus doubles the amount of information read by the drive heads in any given moment compared to a standard drive.

It retails for $299, which means a gigabyte will cost you $1.196. We don’t know what the street prices will be yet, however based solely on the RRP of both the 250GB and the 160GB drive it replaces, we can conclude that the 250GB WD it is better value than its predecessor. We even trawled several online retailers looking for street prices on a 160GB and in some instances even saw the RRP of the 250GB drive offering better value than the street prices of the 160GB predecessor.