Western Digital launches its Scorpio Blue 1TB hard drive

STORAGE VENDOR Western Digital (WD) has announced it is shipping its Scorpio Blue 1TB capacity hard drive for notebooks.

The 2.5in hard drive is super slim at just 9.5mm thick. The drive offers total storage capacity of 1TB by using two disk platters of 500GB each.

Matt Rutledge, VP and GM of Client Storage at WD said, "With the release of the 1 TB WD Scorpio Blue notebook drive in a 9.5 mm package, WD is able to offer the greatest storage capacity available for use in portable computing environments,"

The drive uses a 3Gbits/s SATA interface, spins at 5400RPM and has an 8MB cache. WD claims it is one of the quietest drives on the market and is both reliable and shock tolerant, making it perfect for notebooks and other portable devices.

Power consumption is low at 1.4W when the drive is reading or writing, which drops down to 0.18W when it is idle or in sleep mode. As well as being thin the drive is pretty light at just 110g.

WD said that the Scorpio Blue drive has "data-protection features that actively watch over valuable data". It also has Advanced Format technology that WD claims optimises it for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard.

The WD Scorpio Blue hard drive is shipping now through various distributors and resellers with a guide price of $139. µ