WD ships thin 320GB notebook drive

Western Digital on Wednesday began selling the Scorpio 320GB, the company's largest-ever portable hard drive. At 9.5mm (0.37 inches) tall, the drive is slim enough to fit into thinner notebooks but spins at 5,400RPM, outperforming previous drives that had to throttle back to 4,200RPM to reach their storage levels. The disk also includes shock protection to guard storage in the event of a drop and is purportedly one of the quietest drives at its size and speed levels thanks to intelligent data seeking patterns.

The new leader in the Scorpio range is intended for professional notebook builders but is also available as a barebones kit for use with white-box systems or pre-assembled systems that are easily upgradable through a Serial ATA connector; the drive sells online today for $200 and should be pre-installed in unspecified notebooks soon.