Why didnt you test any of WD's 7200RPM Scorpio black drives? if you wanted to conduct a truly objective comparison you would have included those drives as well.

With WD passing Seagate this last quarter to become the largest drive manufacturer in the world, it seems odd that you left out their best offerings.

be warned: recent 5000BPVT have bug in firmware - hardcoded 8 sec idle timer to stop completely if no r/w requests.
I got a new 5000BPVT scorpio blue, and I am very disappointed.
The hdd completely stops in under 16 sec., then it has to spin up again to read the next part of a file. And the worst thing is that the so-called idle timer can`t be disabled or tuned by WDIDLE3 program (the only means able to fix it for other wd series).
It`s made for MS-DOS by WD, thus difficult to get working on a modern PC.

The stop/start count is growing rapidly. I`m going to return it to the store, claiming that i was not informed about firmware defect that can not be repaired. I`ll ask them to give me xxxBEKT drive or seagate drive.
These drives also utilize 'advanced format'. Advanced format implementation by WD is faulty, because the drives report 512-byte sectors to the OS instead of 4k. Thus their partitions get unaligned, os sector buffers can get unaligned (depends on os) and then the users suffer from bad performance.