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Comments: 252 +- Hardware: Western Digital Announces 1TB Mobile HD on Monday July 27 2009, @04:24PM
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by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday July 27 2009, @04:24PM
from the better-sew-some-deeper-pockets dept.
from the better-sew-some-deeper-pockets dept.
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hardware
Western Digital has announced a couple of new 2.5-inch mobile hard drives weighing in at 750GB and 1TB. The drives feature a 3 GB/s transfer rate and Western Digital's "WhisperDrive" tech along with specialized shock tolerance and head parking to ensure durability. "Both models are shipping now through various channels; the 1TB model is currently available in My Passport Essential SE USB drives. The Scorpio Blue 750GB model has a suggested sticker price of $190 while the Scorpio Blue 1TB is a mere $250. The My Passport Essential SE 1 TB portable drive is $299.99 USD and the 750 GB model is $199.99 USD."
Necessity is a mother.
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Now I can upgrade my PS3 (Score:4, Informative)
to 1 TB since you can put 2.5" hard drives in there.
Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3 (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3 (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Keeping up their mojo (Score:4, Insightful)
Having just had to deal with a string of bad 1 TB+ size Seagate drives going bad (100% failure rate in 6 months, baby!) and switching to WD with good results, I have to say that I hope WD keeps up their good name.
I tend to find that none of the manufacturers are consistently better or worse than the others. Seagate has a good line of firmware, and for a year or two their drives are excellent and reliable. They they go sour and it's a good idea to switch to somebody else for a while. They go off and on, back and forth. For the past few years I've steered towards Seagate. Now, I'm a WD fan. I've loved Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, Quantum, Fujitsu, Conner, and Micropolis. (remember them?)
All have had their good runs and bad runs. Some of the bad runs killed the company. (eg: IBM's Desk-star "death-star" line)
Go WD!
Parent
Cool. Now my music will change again. (Score:4, Interesting)
Finally: Done.
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If it's just sitting there, why use a more expensive 2.5" drive?
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Re:Cool. Now my music will change again. (Score:4, Insightful)
elegance - don't have to deal with the freakin' wall wart from a larger drive. Also, WD says the WD TV is optimised to work with WD passport drives. I don't really know what they mean by that, but I guess it is safe to consider it a good thing.
Really? Really....? You really think they say it works best with THEIR drives for any reason other than to make you think you should buy their drives? It's just marketing fluff, like when Kraft Mac and Cheese says it tastes great with Kraft Parmesan cheese on top, as if any other Parmesan cheese isn't going to provide the same taste sensation.
-Taylor
Parent
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Four words: Specially Activated Flavour Crystals (tm)
Re:Cool. Now my music will change again. (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no "Kraft Parmesan". There is a product called something like it - even containing cellulose if I recall correctly - but it is not Parmesan cheese [wikipedia.org]. Kraft's abomination is an attempt to identify a crappy, industrialized low quality item as a high quality, hand made product of specific origin. In other news: It is only champagne if you make it from special grapes from a special region in a special way. If it isn't, it is sparkling wine.
Parent
Re:Cool. Now my music will change again. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly, I hate when the Plebians call things based on what they look like, taste like, and are manufactured in identical processes too, instead of where they were made! Indeed the other day I saw a man in the deli order a sandwich! How absurd, as if you could get a layered meat and bread product assembled in Sandwich, in the Kent region of England, in a deli in the United States. I politely tried to correct him, but he persisted in his error, and after my repeated attempts, told me to "Shut-up and fuck off".
Parent
Re:Cool. Now my music will change again. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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I've run up against more than a few USB ports that don't appear to provide enough power to spin up 2.5" drives properly. It could also be crappy USB enclosures causing the problem. Annoying really.
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It's both the ports and the drives, but more likely to be the drives these days. There are low powered ports out there (G4 Powerbooks were really bad), but as these 2.5" drives get bigger they also seem to be sucking more power.
These days it seems most (certainly all the ones I've used) disks above say 160GB now need extra power - eg a USB Y cable or separate power cable. Even on ports that previously ran 80GB disks just fine. Maybe the move from IDE to SATA might also have something to do with increased po
Record my life, I guess (Score:3, Funny)
I guess I'll just record my life so I don't forget where I put my keys? I'm sure I'm suffering from lack of creativity in my old age, but that's all I think can think of anymore!
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I've loved IT for decades, and this level of data storage still boggles my mind. At every step, I could think of applications for greater storage - "oh, more OS space is needed", "wow, music would be nice", "movies... obviously", "make an incremental restore point at any point in time"... ok, now what???
I guess I'll just record my life so I don't forget where I put my keys? I'm sure I'm suffering from lack of creativity in my old age, but that's all I think can think of anymore!
Yeah, I was just thinking of that last week. If you read the Wikipedia Entries on Petabytes and Exabytes, and Zettabytes it really starts to make you wonder what we will be using all that space for. On 50 meg drives it was more space for documents, then a couple of gigs and you had just enough space for all your music. On Terabyte drives you can store lots and lots of BluRay rips, something we didn't even think about ten years ago. A good movie collection might still be a few TB though. Beyond that though,
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Hmmm... let's see. I've got about a terabyte of stuff that I've accumulated over the years. Every CD/DVD/Video cassette I've ever bought or borrowed from a friend has been digitized, reencoded and written to a hard drive. That's 100-300 MB per CD and somewhere between 700 and 8000MB per movie. Over the years, I'm up to a 120GB music collection and 800+GB of video... _without_ downloading a single one. If you're a pack rat, you'll fill a terabyte pretty easily, even with legal means :)
If I'd downloaded and k
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At every step, I could think of applications for greater storage - "oh, more OS space is needed", "wow, music would be nice", "movies... obviously", "make an incremental restore point at any point in time"... ok, now what???
And you know what... The Exchange Administrators still only give 50mb for your mailbox 10 years later. ;)
Seriously, what is up with that... My home computer has more hard drive space than many business servers combined.
Seriously, is that much space neccessary ? (Score:2)
I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?
it's the same thing with iPods. the 30 GB model I had was enough to put all my music there, but I only listened to a small subset of it, nothing that a cell phone with a 4 GB couldn't handle.
so, wouldn't it be better to have a smaller, but more energy efficient and thougher disk better ?
then, at home just load and unload what you need, and that's it.
Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine being a photographer on the Paris-Dakar race [wikipedia.org] where you're shooting hundreds (thousands?) of photos on a high-res DSLR for three weeks (a week before hand, the race, the aftermath) out in the field. There are a ton of week long sailing races [flickr.com] that any one photographer might blow through 1000 photos a day. Highest quality 1080p is said to consume 1GB/minute. How many hours of video could national geographic tape with just three of these in the field with a MacBook Pro? Lots of options for pros. Consumers will buy these but rarely use them to their potential.
Parent
Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ? (Score:4, Insightful)
And then he drops something the size of a cigarette pack into the drink or into the sand and it's all gone. They need to make sure they buy 2.
Parent
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Highest quality 1080p is said to consume 1GB/minute.
Is that right? I thought completely uncompressed 1080p was supposed to be something like 3Gbps. Looking at the wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
The movie industry has embraced 1080p24 as a digital mastering format in both native 24p form and in 24PsF form.... For live broadcast applications, a high-definition progressive scan format operating at 1080p at 50 or 60 frames per second is currently being evaluated... as it has doubled the data rate of current 50 or 60 fields interlaced 1920 Ã-- 1080 from 1.485 Gbit/s to nomin
Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ? (Score:5, Informative)
3 Gbps = uncompressed 1080p60 video, used for high-end interconnects and such. Recordings are almost always made compressed, even in professional cameras. AVCHD has a maximum of 24 Mbps = 180MB/minute, there's probably more exotic format for huge movie production cameras but even cameras in the 2000$-5000$ range use AVCHD since it takes a helluva camera to capture more detail than that. The rest is basicly to avoid generational loss so a pipeline looks like:
Camera -> (lossy) -> RAW -> (lossless editing, filtering, special effects etc.) -> Movie -> (lossy) -> final encode for consumer.
You may think it sounds a lot but video compresses very, very well along in the x, y and time axis. In fact, the better the camera the better it usually compresses because everything is clean while noisy, grainy and flickery video eats bandwidth like crazy. I guess if you're shooting staged movie shots with tons of explosions you'll hook up the camera via one of these 3 Gbps interconnects to a real storage kit and save it uncompressed directly, but then you'll need something much faster than this disk anyway.
On a related note, a lot of the videos today are basicly just "filling out the disk" of a BluRay, they don't have that amount of detail. You can tell when there's 1080p reencodes that you need a magnifying class to tell is a reencode. At BluRay sizes we should have had 2160p video instead, you'd get much more detail for 50GB - not that many can tell anyway. So you don't really need all that much space except when you're working with uncompressed intermediaries, but that's what the huge workstations with attached SANs are for.
Parent
Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ? (Score:4, Interesting)
fun fact about movie standards (and I know this because I used to be an art house movie theater projectionist) is that most digital transfers (to "film") are 4096x2048 already. 1080p as a standard is a huge step back in quality to what you're already seeing as "digital".
I don't have the sources now but it was a study on resolution in theaters. Basically a good master negative of a film can have 1500-2000 lines of resolution, but even the best analog cinema prints had only 800-1000 lines of resolution. So digital 1080p movies on digital screens are no worse than before. However, analog film directly scanned to digital is very impressive and probably needs a 4096x2048 (4K) camera to match. Fortunately things are progressing fast and the RED Scarlet coming this year should bring 3K to the 3000$ mark and 4K below 10000$. Compared to all the other costs, that's not much. Hell, even 9K IMAX should drop below 50000$ this year. Personally I'm most impressed with the prosonsumer cams though, it's amazing what they pack in a small HD camera and it gets better every year.
Parent
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so, wouldn't it be better to have a smaller, but more energy efficient and thougher disk better ?
But making smaller, more energy efficient disks also mean that it's easier to fit bigger, higher capacity disks into the same packaging. It's part of the same deal.
I mean, yes, I agree with what you're saying. Putting this drive in my laptop would be overkill. My laptop is currently only using 25 GB. But the nice thing about having lots of different options is everyone can get what they want. With the new flash-based notebook drives, I can get a small, fast, energy-efficient drive, and with this relea
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I have the same thought.
When I bought my MSI Wind, I decided to upgrade the HDD to a 320GB merely because I wanted the faster 7200rpm and because it was fairly cheap. I then put the old drive in my PS3 so it didn't go to waste. The old drive from the PS3 is now my OS drive for my Media Center.
I think with all of my utilities and OS it's taking up maybe 6GB? There's probably some music on there, too.
I keep all of my media on my Media Center and that is because its in my living room. Music, TV Shows, Movies,
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Some of us don't enjoy having our data spread out all over the place on multiple systems with multiple drives. I don't want to have to worry about if I'm going to want some file while I'm traveling, so why not just take everything? That's what these allow people to do.
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I have a big honkin' fileserver at home, but I'm not always there.
Then plug in your 3G modem, MiFi router, or phone with a tether plan, and mount it remotely. Of course, it's not for everybody; some people don't find it worth $60/mo, and others find it too expensive for the 5 GB/mo cap that all the carriers enforce.
games take a rediculous amount of space nowadays
DS games aren't more than 128 MB. Or is that more "greeniculous"?
Parity with desktops now (Score:2)
Roughly two 2.5" drives fit in the space of a 3.5" drive (using common adapters). So with a standard two-drive 2.5" to 3.5" adapter (such as a Bay Rafter), you can now have 2TB with 2.5" or 3.5" drives as your choice.
What might this be useful for? It would reduce the space needed for a RAID-5 array. For example, you could have four drives in two 3.5" slots, running in RAID-5, 3TB usable. With desktop drives, you could at best do RAID-1 with 2TB usable.
It also potentially could have performance benefits. It'
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It actually is clear -- it is 5200rpm, 12ms seek, 8MB buffer.
(at least it is clear if you download the spec sheets from WD)
Sweet Zombie Jesus that's so cool!!! (Score:2)
Yes, now laptop computers can have a whole terabyte to get bashed around, lost and stolen! Yeah!
No, seriously it's Sweet Zombie Jesus level of coolness. Really.
Reliability? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a lot of bits and bytes in a very small space... what's the expected Real Life Span of one of those? I mean it would make a great backup solution, but would you really trust it over (or at least on par with) say, a 3.5" 1TB internal hard drive? Most people I know use these to backup their photos/home movies (pirated media's not worth backing up in most cases, and can be had for free more or less instantly nowadays with BT; home movies are only archived on one computer typically).
Personally, I'm wary of keeping anything on a drive much larger than 300GB for long term data storage.
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Personally, I'm wary of keeping anything on a drive much larger than 300GB for long term data storage.
Why the arbitrary figure? On every announcement of a new drive size, people always wonder about the reliability because of the seemingly huge size. I recall this being said about 1GB drives, and now we're at 2k times that size.
I really can't say I've seen a reliability difference based on differences newness of the drive or the absolute capacity. If you're not backing up, you're risking the loss of your data, regardless of the size of the hard drive. It doesn't even have to be drive failure. What if yo
Capacity vs formats (Score:2)
So hard drive technology has not yet reached it's brick wall. It's good to see that the miniature sized drives also getting huge capacities and are quite affordable. Now, if only SSD's would catch up with larger capacities and more importantly, less stratospheric prices.
As for speed, my WD passport USB2 pocket drive is fast enough to play back full HD video without dropping frames, so there's no speed problems there. Now if only the eeePC had a faster processor.....
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Transfer rate (Score:5, Insightful)
Read: The drives feature a SATA 2 interface, which has a theoretical maximum of 3 Gigabits/s transfer rate, while in practice you'll get 1/4th of that if you're lucky.
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Got any data to back that up?
Re:Transfer rate (Score:5, Informative)
And don't forget that's 3Gbit/s in 10 bit encoding with two parity bits, so you'll at most get 300MB/s. From cache you can get fairly close to that but reading from platters is slower, couldn't find any info on actual sequential read/write speeds.
Parent
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Of course not, they were very good at hiding the fact that their "green" desktop drives are really just 5400RPM drives, they even obfuscated it from their own datasheets.
As an interesting note, the new line of Patriot SSD come very close to the 300MB/s speed, clocking in 280MB/s in reads.
Excellent! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm looking forward to the speed increase. (Score:2)
A 5400 RPM drive of this size should have twice the data transfer of drives that are currently available (500GB). In fact, this should have 10x the throughput of my current laptop drive. I'm drooling already...
Obviously, this only applies to sequential reads/writes. Is there any other bottleneck, or can I actually expect to write large files 10x faster?
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Larger drives generally do have more throughput for a few reasons. First, there are likely to be more platters / read + write heads that can work in parallel. Second, as the drive spins the rate at which the head traverses over sectors does increase - as you assumed.
But there are plenty of reasons why the actual increase will be reduced. First, the time taken to traverse an entire platter at a given RPM increases with denser platters. So if a platter can hold X bits and takes Y seconds to traverse, t
Cripes, it's like they're IN the porn business... (Score:2)
...oh give me a break. Like 1TB on a laptop is gonna be used for Word Docs or "official business"...Please.
Re:Cripes, it's like they're IN the porn business. (Score:5, Funny)
2 and a half inches doesn't get you into the porn business.
Believe me I've tried.
Parent
Nice, except you probably can't use them (Score:5, Informative)
These are 12.5mm drives. The VAST majority of laptops from the last several years (certainly any new enough to have a SATA interface) only allow for 9.5mm drives. I'm sure there's some Alienware rig that's large enough to take them, but chances are your laptop will not.
This is a marketing stunt to say "we're first", even though it won't be usable for most people.
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I am now exceedingly glad I waited to purchase a new HDD for my laptop.
The drive is 2.5 inches, but it is 12.5 mm rather than the standard 9.5 mm thick [anandtech.com] - so it is unlikely to fit in a laptop. On a side note, I wish they started using metric proper instead of this mix of metric and legacy measurements.
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What's the other 250GB for?
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I look at the My Passport Essential SE [wdc.com] specs and see length of 3.1 inches. I look at the WD Scorpio Blue [wdc.com] and see 2.75 inches. Nowhere on their site do I see 2.5 inches. Unless they're doing some horrible rounding.
I think that is platter diameter inside the drive.
-Taylor