macnn/electronista
09/12/2008, 9:55am, EDT
Friday, September 12thWD ships slim 500GB notebook drive
Western Digital on Friday began shipping the 500GB Scorpio Blue, the company's largest-capacity notebook drive. Claiming a record in the process, Western Digital says the disk is the only one to make no sacrifices in size or speed to reach its storage goal. The Serial ATA drive is as tall as normal notebook hard drives at 9.5mm (0.37in) and spins at the same 5,400RPM as most other 2.5-inch disks. Quietness is also considered paramount with an optimized seeking process cutting down on the noise generated by the drive head.
As with most of Western Digital's notebook drives, the Blue is shock-resistant through a now virtually standard technique that parks the head in the event of a sudden drop. The firm is shipping the drive today both as a kit for do-it-yourself upgrades and as an OEM version for notebook manufacturers producing new systems with the added storage. In retail trim, the 500GB Scorpio Blue sells for $220 and will be complemented by a 400GB drive at $190.
Filed under: upgrades/storage
Other story tags: Western Digital, Scorpio
, 
, 2
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
Top
subscribe to comments
for this article
What About Samsung?
Are these guys clueless? I have a 500GB samsung spinpoint drive in my MacBook Pro - it's 500GB, 9.5mm and 2.5" spinning at 5400 rpm.
They've been shipping for a while now and are available for under $200.00.
Sorry WD, but you're not the first.
Late, but worth it I hope
Not only not first, but actually rather late. Even worse, this is just the internal drive, there's no announcement yet for the Passport. I've been holding off on getting a 500GB portable external, hopefully WD will release it soon and it will be of the same quality/functionality as the others in the lineup.