Western Digital Begins Shipments of 750GB, 1TB HDDs for Mobile Computer

From X-bit Labs: Western Digital, a leading maker of hard disk drives (HDDs), said on Tuesday that it had initiated shipments of hard drives for mobile computers with 750GB and 1TB capacities. The new HDDs utilize 375GB platters and feature larger 4KB sectors.

The new WD Scorpio Blue 750GB and 1TB hard drives feature 5400rpm and 5200rpm spindle speed, respectively; 8MB cache, Serial ATA-300 interface and so on. Western Digital declares similar average latency of 5.5ms in spite of lower spindle speed on the 1000MB model as well as equal read seek time of 12ms and track-to-track seek time of 2ms. Since the 1TB WD Scorpio Blue hard disk drive sports three platters, it has height of 12.5mm, whereas the 750MB drive had industry-standard height for 2.5” HDDs – 9.5mm. The drives boast with a set of performance improving technologies from WD.

"WD continues to lead the market with capacity points that enable consumers and business professionals to store large quantities of data and rich media content. Our leading power efficiency, achieved without compromise to performance, is another example of the added features and value that our customers have come to expect from WD,” said Jim Morris, WD's senior vice president and general manager of storage products.

Just like 2.5” mobile hard drives announced last week by Toshiba, WD’s new Scorpio Blue HDDs sport 4KB sectors, which allow to greatly boost aerial densities as well as performance of hard disk drives in newer operating systems. However, the drives may not work efficiently under Microsoft Windows XP that was launched almost a decade ago and was designed with 512 bytes sectors in mind.

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