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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Record my life, I guess (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Reliability? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 you lost power? Do you have battery backup? Even notebook batteries can occasionally cut out before the OS expects the battery to be depleted. What if the software corrupts your data? Or you realize that you deleted the wrong file too late for an undelete?
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".
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cool. Now my music will change again. (Score:2, Insightful)
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!
Re:Cool. Now my music will change again. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 power requirements.