Jul. 27, 2009
Add to 
del.icio.us
Digg this
Computer peripheral maker Western Digital has just announced two new laptop hard disk drives that offer much larger
amounts of storage capacity than before. The new units are called the Scorpio Blue 1000 with 1 terra byte (1,000 Gigs)
of capacity, and the new Scorpio Blue 750 with a capacity of 750 Gigs.
Prior to these news, the largest laptop hard drive available was 500GB.
As it stands now, the largest desktop hard drive on the market currently is limited to 2 terra bytes. The Scorpio Blue
1000 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 Western Digital laptop drives are the first that use 333 Gb per platter technology.
Other than sheer capacity, the new Scorpio Blue drives also feature a set of advanced storage technologies, including:
WhisperDrive, a technology that produces a very quiet drive
ShockGuard, which helps the drive better withstand shock such as accidental drops
SecurePark, a mechanism that parks the recording heads off the disk surface
Both new drives come with 8 Mb of buffer memory and spin at 5,200 RPM, which is slightly slower than the 5400 RPM
speed of mainstream laptop drives.
The Scorpio Blue hard drives fully support the SATA 2 (3 Gbps) standard but have a thickness of 12.5 millimeters,
as opposed to 9.5 millimeters in other 2.5-inch laptop drives.
This simply means that the new drives won't be able to fit in all 2.5-inch slots in laptops.
For this reason, Western Digital 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 in the next two to three months.
The Scorpio Blue 750 GB drive is available now and costs $190. The 1 tera byte version is 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.
Add to
del.icio.us
Digg this
Source: Western Digital.
Bookmark this Tech Blog by
clicking here.
Home |
Write to us
