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WD's 9.5mm Scorpio Blue 1TB laptop hard drive gets benchmarked
These days, it's hard to shake the urge to pop a solid state drive into your next laptop, but even if you're down with dropping the requisite coin, the restrictive capacity choices may make it darn near impossible for pack rats to bite. For those fitting squarely into that category, there's Western Digital's newest laptop drive: the 9.5mm 1TB Scorpio Blue. It's one of the first in this form factor (read: the one that slips into most everything smaller than a Clevo) to hit the 1TB milestone, and at just $99, it's a veritable bargain. The benchmarking gurus over at Hot Hardware threw it through the usual gauntlet of tests, pitting it against a 500GB Scorpio Black and a 640GB Seagate Momentus. As you'd likely expect, the 1TB spinner bested the competition in SiSoftware, ATTO and CrystalDiskMark tests, though not by a tremendous margin. Still, taking performance up a notch while also boasting a full terabyte of space makes it somewhat of a no-brainer for capacity freaks, and you can hit the source for a barrage of charts proving as much.
Western Digital now shipping 2.5-inch 1TB Scorpio Blue HDD in standard height
Be still, our hearts! Could it be? One thousand twenty-four gigabytes of spinning Scorpio Blue fixed disk finally sized for standard height? If you'll recall, the line of laptop-oriented HDDs was bumped up to 750GB way back in 2010, and now Western Digital's shipping its 9.5mm-high 1TB Scorpio Blue HDDs (shortened from 12.5mm). Aside from the storage capacity increase, the dual-platter drive is essentially the same as any other Blue sporting a 5,400 RPM spin-speed and 8MB cache with Advanced Format support. This latest go-getter will be available for the rather reasonable price of $140, but hey, if that SSD-esque Scorpio black's what you're really lusting after, we understand. Full PR after the break.
WD throws out 2.5-inch 750GB Scorpio Black hard drive, makes your laptop beg for an upgrade
Too broke to spring for an SSD? Fret not, as you're most definitely not alone. Thankfully for you, Western Digital's still cranking out lust-worthy hard drives, with its latest Scorpio Black being particularly so. Offering 750GB of capacity, 16MB of cache and a 7200RPM spindle speed, the WD7500BPKT relies on Advanced Format technology to make the magic happen. It's on sale starting right about now for $149, giving you little reason to continue to conserve space on that 128GB drive you've been living with for the past three years.
Hitachi intros Travelstar 5K750 and 7K750 mobile hard drives: 750GB at 9.5mm
It's a common story, really. Your puny 120GB mobile hard drive has been overflowing for months, and you've been waiting for what feels like an eternity for an affordable, capacious SSD. It's about time to give up the fantasy and get real, and thankfully Hitachi GST is making said pill a touch easier to swallow. The company's new Travelstar 5K750 (5400RPM; 8MB buffer) and 7K750 (7200RPM; 16MB buffer) have been announced this morning, and they're the company's first to feature Advanced Format. In other news, they're also the industry's largest drives in a standard-height form factor, cramming up to 750GB (375GB per platter) into a conventional 9.5mm shell that'll slip into just about any laptop made in the last decade. Yeah, WD managed to stuff 1TB into a laptop drive earlier in the year, but you'll need a machine that's beefy enough to handle a 12mm height drive in order to take advantage. At any rate, the drives will also be available in 500GB and 640GB sizes for those who can't handle three-quarters of a terabyte, and while the 5K750 family is already shipping in volume with a starting tag of $129.99, the speedier 7K750 crew won't be out until Q1 2011.
WD intros standard-height 2.5-inch 750GB Scorpio Blue HDD
Western Digital already shipped the industry's first 2.5-inch 1TB hard drive last summer, but unfortunately for most, it couldn't be used as a drop-in solution for upgrading one's laptop drive. The reason? It relies on an unorthodox 12.5mm height form factor, while the vast majority of laptops only support 9.5mm height drives. Now, the outfit has pushed out a 750GB Scorpio Blue, a 2.5-incher that does indeed utilize the standard height form factor, and while this here unit includes Advanced Format and WhisperDrive, the 5,400RPM spindle speed is admittedly disappointing. It's tough to argue with the $149 price, though, and it's available now if you've been hankering for more space within your mobile workhorse.
Win XP needs some TLC to use next-gen hard drives
Solid state drives may be the fast-moving wave of the future in PC storage, but the technology for bigger and better magnetic media keeps on trucking. Only recently, that truck hit something of a pothole: the 4096-byte sector size that will allow advanced format drives to have more usable space (and surpass the current 2TB capacity limit) doesn't play nice with the world's most popular OS -- Windows XP. While manufacturers like Western Digital have already introduced software that successfully combats the problem, the new drives perform poorly in Win XP without it, and rival manufacturer Seagate told the BBC that even with software tricks, XP users should expect the occasional 5ms delay, or 10% speed reduction, during write times. Is this the end of Windows XP? Hardly. Should you make sure to install the software that comes with your next hard drive? Absolutely.
WD's 'Advanced Format' Caviar Green HDD gets benchmarked, minor benefits found
Western Digital has yet to actively market its "advanced format" hard drives -- in fact, there's a decent chance you've no idea what we're talking about if you weren't tuned in on December 11th. In short, it's a technology that alters a hard drive's sector size from 512 bytes (the standard for the past three decades) to 4096K, which enables the ECC data to be stored in a more efficient manner. Just recently, WD began to ship Advanced Format Caviar Green hard drives, and the benchmarking gurus over at Hot Hardware strapped one in to see exactly how much of the hype was warranted. For starters, they debunked the thought that Advanced Format drives offered more usable space; Windows reported 931GB of free space on both AF and non-AF 1TB drives. They also go on to explain how to make AF drives play nice with Windows XP, and on the testing front, they found that an aligned AF Caviar Green drive could (mostly) hang with the higher end (and more expensive) Caviar Black. Pop that source link for the full skinny, particularly if you're a WinXP user looking to snag a new drive.
Western Digital 'advanced format' promises slight boost in usable space
Sure, you may have been able to double your hard drive's storage space with DriveSpace back in the day, but it looks like Western Digital has now come up with a new, more foolproof way to eek out a few more gigabytes from its drives. Dubbed 'advanced format,' the company's new partitioning method promises to do away with each individual sector having its own Sync/DAM header and ECC, and instead move to larger, 4k physical sectors. As you can see in the helpful illustration above, that shift would also actually increase the size of the ECC, but WD says the net gain in usable storage space should still be between seven and eleven percent (which would certainly be welcome when we're talking about 1TB or 2TB drives). Unfortunately, you won't simply be able to update the firmware and reformat your current drive, but WD will apparently be moving its Caviar Green line to the new format in the "next few weeks," and eventually shift the rest of its drives over as well.
