Western Digital releases 1TB laptop hard drive

The storage-capacity gap between laptop and desktop hard drives just shrank significantly.

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 support the SATA2 (3Gbps) standard but have a thickness of 12.5 millimeters, as opposed to 9.5 millimeters in other 2.5-inch drives. This means the new drives will not fit in all 2.5-inch slots in laptops.

For this reason, WD designates them as a perfect fit for portable storage solutions and they'll be in 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.

[Spartan_458]

Impressive. Now they just need to use that tech to make the desktop drives bigger. 4TB, anyone?

[pithenumber]

Agreed

[JulianDave]

1TB MP3 players?

[ddesy]

Heck, I'd settle for a decent quality 320GB player! High capacity and FLAC support paired with decent DACs are what I've been wanting for a long time.

[pithenumber]

MP3 players use 1.8inch, not 2.5inch I think

[baconstang]

I've wanting a player that can play 24/96 for years, of course it would need a very large drive.

[STARWOBBLE]

@ Pithenumber<br /><br />I think the HD based iPods use 1.8 inch drives... My old Creative Zen Nomad Jukebox Xtra runs on standard 2.5 inch laptop hard drives. Based on what people reported on the now defunct nomadness forums was that when higher capacity drives were placed in the players the player had problems cataloging large amounts of ID3 tags above the 30 or 40 gb offered by Creative. The firmware was only setup to catalog so many ID3 tags and the high capacity drives held too many mp3's for the firmware to handle.

[skrubol]

If sound quality matters, hard drives don't seem to be the way to go. All of the ipods I've had (I've had all HD based,) have had clicks and pops while accessing the hard drive.<br />How about a player with 2 or 4 SD slots? Up to 128GB with today's tech, buy as you need, low power, and could be quite compact.

[apinkston]

Yeah they do need to upgrade the external HDDs now. I mean we have laptop drives at 1TB and externals capping at 2TBs. Let's go technology, lol. <br /> <br />I was planning to get one the 1TB drive for my PS3 (currently have 320GB with under 10GB left and not wanting to go to 500 b/c I'll ultimately need more). <br /> <br />But i'm curious as to 12.5mm versus the 9.5 mm. I can't remember which one the PS3 uses and this question is to the writer of the article.. "Did you mean both the 1TB drive and the 750GB HDD BOTH have 12.5mm thickness?" <br /> <br />Just curious, b/c if I can't use the 1TB for reasons mentioned above, then I'd go ahead and get the 750GB one. <br /> <br />thx in adv.

[tiger1688]

both drives are 12.5mm according to this article. Read the article thoroughly and pay attention to details.

[skrubol]

They both have 3 platters (333GB x2 =666GB,) so yes, both 12.5mm.

[myles taylor]

I'm more interested in solid state technology for laptops. We need to get away from spinning drives in portable devices because it makes them more prone to failure. <br /><br />On the flipside, after these go through testing, I'll probably pop one in my laptop. Can't afford that SSD yet.

[monkeyfun14]

Currently the opposite holds true the disk drives are more reliable then the SSD's as far as lifetime.

[renGek]

thats why they need to keep working on SSD so that it can be cheaper and more reliable. Its the way to go. Plus, these drives are 5200 rpm which is just way too slow.

[MyRightEye]

12.5mm drives are pretty much useless. They won't fit in 90% of laptops.

[Thranx]

Fantastic achivement... but it's going to be slow a snot. :(

[XiroMisho]

Eh... Size in a laptop is not what I'm after... if these were at 7,200 rpm I'd be happier... though I do wonder how the seeking/Parallel recording helps them compare against 5,400 rpm drives... probably equal for the most part,

[BrujoSalazar]

I'm holding out until the 1000000 Exa Byte comes or the zettabyte!

[BrujoSalazar]

Or the yottabyte with a with a 20,000,000 RPM drive! To the moon Alice!

[Thomas7779]

Does it fit in the Macbook Pro 15 inch?

[BrujoSalazar]

if you go to apples site you could read the specs on your macbook. it should say hdd form factor or sixe etc. etc.

[BrujoSalazar]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2119528,00.asp

[tiger1688]

what is this April 23, 2007 ****????

[Kevico_Suave]

I'm pretty excited about this. These are USB bus powered. Sure, they're slow, but they're fast enough to carry a ton of music and video files and can be used for portable backup.

[marcjen]

This would be a great achievement if they kept the form factor the same. You're making the drive about 30% larger than other drives. I can see the application with portable/external drives, however.

[tiger1688]

any advancement for notebook is exciting and even we know in 6 months the landscape will change again, I am just thrilled that WD is continue to invest in R&#38;D and put out new products. Way to go. There is always going to be criticisms, that is the society has come to, but, I just want to say, way to go and continue to do your best to innovate in this down market. Although pricing is high and we hope channel will bring it down. As there are notebook in the 199-299 range, if the HD is 150-250, and SOB Windows cost another 3 figure, the notebook will still be hard reach for the needie. But, the new product will pressure the old drives to below $60 range and when it goes below $40, then the netbook and low end notebook will help those who really need it. Good job WD! Great review! Hope MTBF is up there also and not at the expense of the 5200 RPM.

[BrujoSalazar]

Surely somebody sees the hilarity of my rambles? Anyone?

[Mr. Dogers2U]

Sure, clever boy, impressed with yourself aren't you.

[Mr. Dogers2U]

I have mixed feelings on this, I have yet to have a Western Digital HD NOT fail. Some die as early as 1 year old, some last 2-3, but they have ALL died. I have had Seagate, IBM's and Hitachi drives get noisy when they were 5-7 years old but not one failure. I wish Apple would stop using WD drives altogether . . . just my experience.

[skrubol]

I have 2-6 month old velociraptors that are still running.<br />Other than that I think I've only had one WD drive (500GB) and it died recently. None of my half-dozen IBM/Hitachi 'deathstars' have failed.

[sanjayb]

I have a1.5 yeard old Macbook Pro. Use it almost everyday. So far so good. No HD failures.

[MadLyb]

How can you call it a laptop drive if it will not fit in a laptop?...Seriously? <br /> <br />While I can appreciate the capacity and the technical efforts that went into building it, come back and see when: <br /> <br />A) It is 9.5mm, so I can use it in my laptop <br />B) It is a Scorpio Black (7200 rpm), so I can actually acess the data in a timely manner. <br /> <br />Yes...I am demanding...that is because I am the consumer? 8^P

[technewsjunkie]

Want one in my iPhone!

[pithenumber]

iPhone doesn't use an HDD

[tech_crazy]

Which is why he wants it, I guess!

[Another_LA_Mac_Guy]

I want to know where the heck I can buy one now!

Hope you are enjoying your vacation, Rick. You deserve it. Thanks for all the cheapskate blogs.