How big is your little hard drive?
Betcha it’s nowhere near this size!
This morning, Western Digital announced the first one terabyte mobile hard drive. The new WD Scorpio Blue SATA hard drives is the industry’s highest-capacity 2.5-inch drive available.
According to their early morning press release, the “industry-leading 333 GB-per-platter technology enables the new drive to offer mobile storage device and notebook users an enormous 1 TB capacity”.
Think you don’t need that much laptop storage? Well then, a there’s also a new 750 GB Scorpio Blue drive.
Here is the technical stuff:
The new internal drives have a 12.5 mm form factor and are ideally suited for use in “portable storage solutions”, anything and everything from notebooks and small form factor desktop PCs, to gaming consoles and portable music devices. Both Scorpio Blue drives are said to deliver a 3 gigabits per second transfer rate.
In case you don’t want to crack open your computer to install a bigger drive Western Digital has also announced two new external, plug-in devices utilizing these larger drives. My Passport Essential SE Portable USB Drives will also come in the new 1 TB and 750 GB formats. They are USB-powered and they come in a variety of colors!
As for prices, WD’s My Passport Essential SE portable drives are available now at “select retail stores” and from WD’s online store. MSRP for the 1 TB portable drive is $299.99 and is $199.99 for the 750 GB model.
If you’re interested in the just hard drives, take $50 off each of the above prices. One warning though: for now, the 1TB drive is available only bundled in the My Passport Essential SE USB enclosure.
You can store a whole ot of stuff in drives this size. More importantly, maybe it will spur consumers and online services to demand better resolution (and larger) music and video files. As larger (and cheaper) portable storage drives become available there will be less and less excuse.