Monday, July 27, 2009

Western Digital's New 1TB Laptop Hard Drive

Source: CNET News

Increasing the storage capacity on laptops has taken a leap with the 2 new Laptop Hard Drives from Western Digital
.

Western Digital announced Monday two laptop drives that offer "extreme" amounts of storage: the Scorpio Blue 1TB and the Scorpio Blue 750GB. Prior to this announcement, the largest laptop hard drive available was 500GB.

Scorpio Blue

(Credit: Western Digital)

Currently, the largest desktop hard drive on the market is 2TB. The Scorpio Blue 1TB drive, though half the capacity, is still very impressive, considering the fact that a 2.5-inch laptop drive is much smaller than a 3.5-inch desktop drive. The new WD laptop drives are the first that use 333GB per platter technology.


The Scorpio Blue Hard Drives are a little incompatible, having a thickness of 12.5 mm opposed to the standard of 9.5 mm. For such reasons, WD says the new drives will be perfect for portable storage as WD's new My Passport Essential SE Portable USB Drive.



Other than capacity, the new Scorpio Blue drives also feature a set of advanced storage technologies, including:

  • WhisperDrive, which is WD's technology that uses seeking algorithms to produce one of the quietest 2.5-inch drives available
  • ShockGuard, which helps the drive withstanding shock, such as accidental drops, and vibrations better
  • SecurePark, which is a mechanism that parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up and spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures that the recording head never touches the disk surface to improve long-term reliability

Both new drives come with 8MB of buffer memory and spin at 5,200rpm, which is slightly slower than the 5400rpm speed of mainstream laptop drives.

The Scorpio Blue 750GB drive (model WD7500KEVT) is available now and costs $190. The 1TB version (model WD10TEVT) is, for now, only available configured into the My Passport Essential SE USB drive, but it will be available as an internal hard drive in a few weeks. It will cost $250.


However, the bigger the better!!!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

No comments: