By Chris Scott Barr

Technology is always being improved upon, usually meaning faster speeds and more storage coming in smaller packages. One of the latest technological milestones comes to us from Western Digital. The hard drive manufacturer has announced that they have crafted the highest capacity 2.5-inch drives. Utilizing 333GB platter technology, they were able to birth 750GB and 1TB drives. There’s only one small problem. Specifically a 3mm problem.

When you hear about a 2.5-inch hard drive, you’ll probably think that its primary function is to sit inside a laptop. Well if you were to crack open most laptops, you’ll find a drive that measures 2.5-inches long, and 9.5mm thick. Unfortunately these new drives from Western Digital are 12.5mm thick. This means that there are going to be a lot of notebooks that don’t accept these new larger drives.

Since these aren’t going to work in a lot of laptops, Western Digital says that they will be perfect for portable storage solutions. Unfortunately, I’m not thinking that they’ll perform all that well in this area either. First, the drive only spins at a paltry 5200RPM, meaning it will be slow as molasses. The cache is also a measly 8MB. Frankly, $190 for the 750GB and $250 for the 1TB drive are too expensive for that speed. I can get a 3.5-inch 1TB drive that spins at 7200RPM with a 32MB cache for around $80. It’s a little bigger, sure, but if you’re actually storing files large enough to require that much space, you’ll really notice the difference in speed.

[ Western Digital ] VIA [ Crave ]

by Shane McGlaun

Anyone who has been around computers long enough will remember when machines had hard drives measured in mere megabytes and sales people said you would never fill that much space up. Slowly we moved into gigabytes and today we are working with terabyte capacity hard drives.

Typically, it takes a pair of hard drives to hit 2TB, but Western Digital has announced new MyBook external storage drives that have 2TB of storage in a single drive device. The 2TB drives are available in the entire My Book line including the Studio Edition, Mac Edition, Home Edition, and Essential Edition.

The Mac and Studio editions are preformatted for Mac OS and include quad interfaces. Other versions of the My Book line are formatted for Windows and offer eSATA, FireWire, and USB on some models. All of the drives have power saving features that turn the drive off after ten minutes with no use. The drives are available now at pricing ranging from $329.99 to $379.99.

[ Western Digital ]

Western Digital rolled out its latest 2.5-inch notebook hard drive today that will also see duty in small form factor external storage devices. The 320GB drive uses the SATA 3.0GB/s interface and has a transfer rate of 850Mbits/s maximum.

The Scorpio 320GB drive has a 5400-rpm spindle speed and an average read seek time of 12 ms. The buffer size is 8 MB and average latency is 4.20 ms. The small drive has a profile only 9.5mm thick so it should lend itself well to use in small USB drives. WD also uses proprietary technology to make the drive quiet, it produces only 26dBA in seek mode. Teh MSRP for the 320Gb drive is $199.99.

VIA [ Western Digital ]