WD Blue 2.5-inch Mobile 500GB

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 150 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.

Use it as a second drive for bulk storage next to an SSD, not as the only drive. If 500GB is all you need, a 2.5-inch SATA SSD fits the same bay and is several times faster. Compare them in our SSD listings.

• WD Blue 2.5-inch Mobile 1TB (WD10SPZX): 1TB, 7mm
• WD Blue 2.5-inch Mobile 2TB (WD20SPZX): 2TB, 7mm

• Western Digital datasheet
• Western Digital product page