Western Digital Announces 1TB Mobile HD 252
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."
Now I can upgrade my PS3 (Score:4, Informative)
to 1 TB since you can put 2.5" hard drives in there.
Re:Glad I waited... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3 (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:2.5 inches? Are you sure? (Score:3, Informative)
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
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.
Re:Transfer rate (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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.