Western Digital Releases 1TB Scorpio Blue Mobile Hard Drive

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

Don't bother wiping your eyes... you didn't read the news title incorrectly! It feels like storage companies just released 500GB 2.5" mobile drives, but today Western Digital looks to put those to shame, with their latest Scorpio Blue models, available in both 750GB and 1TB densities. WD if the first to pull this off, and as a result, pretty soon you'll be able to have a full 1TB worth of storage on your notebook... with only one drive.

The new 1TB density also opens up room for even more storage on your workstation notebook if you have room for more than one hard drive. Or, another way to look at is, is now you'll be able to use an SSD as your main drive, and then use a 1TB Scorpio Blue as your secondary. Either way, 1TB in a drive that small, is rather incredible. But...

With a height of 12.5mm, the latest drives are close to 32% taller (depth-wise) than typical mobile drives, which means that they will not fit in the majority of notebooks. So, if you're planning to purchase such a drive, it's important to make sure your notebook will support it. WD realizes that adoption for mobile platforms will be limited, at least at first, so they're pushing the new drives more for external storage purposes, such as with their My Passport Essential SE portable drives.

Any way you look at it, though, 1TB in such a small drive is nothing short of incredible. That's an insane amount of storage to be able to carry with you anywhere... not to mention, it'd be perfect for backing up your computer to. It's so small, you can stash it anywhere and not look at it until you need it again! Pricing will of course be a bit higher than double 500GB models, but not by much. The 1TB version will sell for $249.99 USD, while the 750GB will carry a price tag of $189.99.

The WD Scorpio Blue 750 GB and 1 TB hard drives have a 12.5 mm form factor[1] and are ideally suited for use in portable storage solutions, such as the newly released My Passport™ Essential SE Portable USB Drives. Other applications include select notebooks and small form factor desktop PCs, where quiet and cool operation are important. Both WD Scorpio Blue drives deliver high-performance with a 3 gigabits per second (Gb/s) transfer rate.

Source: Western Digital

[Kougar]

Learn something new every day... so even if it is a 2.5" drive that doesn't guarantee it is formfactor compatible with any laptop or 2.5" device. Such much for standards!

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by Kougar

Learn something new every day... so even if it is a 2.5" drive that doesn't guarantee it is formfactor compatible with any laptop or 2.5" device. Such much for standards!

Yeah, who even knows what 2.5" means anymore. As I mentioned, the initial 500GB drives (I believe were released just this past CES) were the exact same way. Some notebooks support it, but I don't believe any mainstream or "affordable" ones do, due to size.

[Kougar]

I just never understood the need for so much disk room on a laptop to be honest... I wouldn't ever want to store data on a laptop drive, and flash sticks are slowly getting cheaper for 32GB sizes now.

For someone that doesn't even have a desktop I might see that, but then again that's why they make external hard drives.

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by Kougar

I just never understood the need for so much disk room on a laptop to be honest... I wouldn't ever want to store data on a laptop drive, and flash sticks are slowly getting cheaper for 32GB sizes now.

Well, this is the digital age, and some people just can't help but load all their downloaded videos on their laptop to take on the go. Not to just watch them themselves, but to show friends and the like. Drives like this, though, for the most part, cater more to people who use notebooks as a desktop replacement. Sure, external storage is fine, but that's still not too "mobile".

Nothing stops people from taking it all with them, and keeping regular backups on an external storage device.