The Western Digital WD5000LPVX 500GB is a hard disk drive, which means it stores data using quickly rotating disks, or platters, that can be read and written on via the moving actuator arm. Hard disk drives generally have a large storage capacity, and so are perfect for large amounts of data. The potential performance is well below that of solid-state drives, but they can definitely still hold their own. The Western Digital WD5000LPVX 500GB is a decent primary hard disk drive choice, but its performance is somewhat lacking.

With a cache of 8MB, the Western Digital WD5000LPVX 500GB can store a very small amount of data temporarily. Loading data that has previously been loaded will result in barely any difference in access speed and load duration. At a speed of 5400 RPM, the hard disk drive spins at a below average speed. This speed is common for laptop hard drives, and may have long-term reliability and low-power benefits, but the resulting hard drive performance is noticeably slow.

With a capacity of 500GB, the Western Digital WD5000LPVX 500GB has a fairly small amount of storage for an hard disk drive. Using the SATA 3.0 6Gb/s interface this hard disk drive will never be limited by its connection with the motherboard. In fact, mechanical hard disk drives cannot even reach the bandwidth capacity allowed by SATA 2.0 3Gb/s, so it would not matter even if it were plugged into a SATA 2.0 motherboard slot.

A form factor size of 2.5" is standard for laptop drives and solid-state drives, and this will fit into any 2.5" drive bay. These drive bays are not yet ubiquitous, but it will also fit into a standard 3.5" or 5.25" drive bay with the appropriate adapter.