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.
Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong. 
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.
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.
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).
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?"
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.
thx in adv.
On the flipside, after these go through testing, I'll probably pop one in my laptop. Can't afford that SSD yet.
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.
While I can appreciate the capacity and the technical efforts that went into building it, come back and see when:
A) It is 9.5mm, so I can use it in my laptop
B) It is a Scorpio Black (7200 rpm), so I can actually acess the data in a timely manner.
Yes...I am demanding...that is because I am the consumer? 8^P
- by August 20, 2009 4:12 AM PDT
- Hope you are enjoying your vacation, Rick. You deserve it. Thanks for all the cheapskate blogs.
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