WD Blue 2.5-inch Mobile 2TB

At 7mm it fits every 2.5-inch laptop bay, including the thin 7mm bays in most laptops from the last decade. Your laptop needs a 2.5-inch SATA bay, and most laptops sold since 2020 have only M.2 slots. Many budget laptops ship with an empty bay but no SATA cable or bracket, so check both before ordering. Our laptop upgrade checker lists the laptops we know have a bay.

It spins at 5400 rpm with a 128MB cache, and Western Digital rates it at up to 149 MB/s sustained transfer. That is fine for storing and streaming files, and slow next to any SSD.

It uses SMR (shingled magnetic recording), which the datasheet states. Reads behave normally, but long continuous writes, such as copying a whole backup at once, slow down sharply once the drive's cache fills. For a photo, video or game library that is rarely a problem; as the drive Windows runs from, it is.

Its reason to exist is capacity: 2TB in a laptop bay. Pair it with an SSD for Windows and apps, and keep media and archives here. Compare 2.5-inch SATA SSDs in our SSD listings if speed matters more than space.

• WD Blue 2.5-inch Mobile 500GB (WD5000LPZX): 500GB, 7mm
• WD Blue 2.5-inch Mobile 1TB (WD10SPZX): 1TB, 7mm

• Western Digital datasheet
• Western Digital product page