WD ships dual-platter 500GB mobile drive

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee

Post Reply
line
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 338
Joined: Wed Sep 28, 2005 10:07 pm
Location: Israel

WD ships dual-platter 500GB mobile drive

Post by line » Sat Sep 13, 2008 2:45 pm

http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/15502

"The latest contender on the 500GB mobile hard-drive stage is now shipping, Western Digital has announced. The new WD Scorpio Blue 500GB hard drive has a 2.5" form factor, 5,400-RPM platter speed, 300MB/s Serial ATA interface, 8MB buffer, and - most importantly - only two platters. Each platter in the Scorpio Blue packs a surprisingly dense 250GB, which could give Western Digital an edge over its competitors with potentially louder and power-hungrier three-platter 500GB drives.

"WD rates the Scorpio Blue for 24-26dB noise levels, 12-ms read seek times, and 2.5W power dissipation during reads and writes. The drive reportedly includes "proprietary features that make [it] extraordinarily quiet, while running at cool operating temperatures," too.

"The 500GB Scorpio Blue is currently shipping through "select distributors and resellers," with a suggested retail price of $219.99. WD also has a 400GB Scorpio Blue model based on the same platters, and that particular offering has a $189.99 suggested retail price. Both models come with three-year warranties."

lemmy
Posts: 53
Joined: Fri Mar 23, 2007 11:08 am

Post by lemmy » Sun Sep 14, 2008 8:38 am

Those look real nice. I wonder if WD will ever sell just the cooling frame from the velociraptor for laptop drives.

FartingBob
Patron of SPCR
Posts: 744
Joined: Tue Mar 04, 2008 4:05 am
Location: London
Contact:

Post by FartingBob » Sun Sep 14, 2008 12:36 pm

lemmy wrote:Those look real nice. I wonder if WD will ever sell just the cooling frame from the velociraptor for laptop drives.
I was under the impression it wasnt very good for cooling. And how many laptop drives need a heatsink? The VR does fine without the cooler, and it runs very hot compared to most 2.5" drives.

npp
Posts: 35
Joined: Wed Sep 20, 2006 8:43 am

Post by npp » Sun Sep 14, 2008 1:56 pm

Xbitlabs reported the drives will feature 3 platter, 166GB each... With WD being traditionaly quiet on the topic, it isn't entirely clear how many platters the drives will carry at the end. I'd bet 2, given the 9,5mm height, but who knows. A single-platter 250GB drive sounds like a very nice upgrade path to me, right now I'm strugling to fit 2 OS and all my stuff on 100GB.

lemmy
Posts: 53
Joined: Fri Mar 23, 2007 11:08 am

Post by lemmy » Mon Sep 15, 2008 12:09 pm

FartingBob wrote:
lemmy wrote:Those look real nice. I wonder if WD will ever sell just the cooling frame from the velociraptor for laptop drives.
I was under the impression it wasnt very good for cooling. And how many laptop drives need a heatsink? The VR does fine without the cooler, and it runs very hot compared to most 2.5" drives.
I was more thinking of just the unit itself functioning more as a bracket and not so much for the cooling capability. It's a slick looking unit and would avail me the use of low power and decent capacity notebook drives in my tower without having to rig something in the bracket area that holds my standard dimension HD(s).

Post Reply