Western Digital ships first 2.5-inch 1 TB hard drive

[clifford_cooley]

Western Digital ships first 2.5-inch 1 TB hard drive

Storage giant Western Digital has announced that they have started volume shipments of their WD Scorpio Blue 9.5mm, 2.5-inch mobile hard drive in a 1 TB capacity. The drive, which conforms to the industry standard 9.5mm form factor, features two internal 500 GB platters and makes Western Digital the first to reach such capacity in a 2.5-inch notebook-friendly design.

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Western Digital is shipping the 1 TB Scorpio Blue now through select distributors and resellers. The drive is backed by a standard 3-year warranty with an MSRP of $139.

Read the whole article - Western Digital ships first 2.5-inch 1 TB hard drive

Anyone interested in purchasing this 1TB HDD?
Or does everyone have their eyes set on SSD's?

Personally I would purchase the 1TB drive while waiting for SSD's to drop down to $1 per 1GB range.
Where exactly have you drawn a line in the sand for SSD price drops?

Unless you have a place for two drives in the computer, why settle for 700MB per dollar with a SSD when you can get nearly 7GB per dollar with a platter?

I'm interested in everyones thought on the topic.

 

[TrainableMan]

SSD isn't ideal for constantly changing data. It is best suited for dual drives with unchanging OS being on the SSD and data on platters. (Kind of like an incandesant light filament it burns out faster the more often it is turned on and off.)

But the only reason you need a 2.5 is for laptops or the small HTPC's etc which often do not have space for 2 drives. Even if I had space for dual-drives I would consider 2 of these 1TBs or an SSD and a 1TB. So frankly I believe laptops/HTPC's will provide a huge market for this 1TB drive.

I haven't jumped on the SSD bandwagon because I fail to see it's value on my machine for what I use it to do.

 

[clifford_cooley]

I haven't jumped on the SSD bandwagon because I fail to see it's value on my machine for what I use it to do.

Thats my thought as well.

 

[yodap]

I'm slightly intrigued by this. I'd be more intrigued if it was a caviar black. Scorpio blue's get horrible reviews.

I have no interest in ssd's. I think they're a scam. (Or let me just say, not for me.)

 

[Nibiru2012]

I have no interest in ssd's. I think they're a scam. (Or let me just say, not
for me.)

You know they're not a scam yodap, they're becoming more popular all the time.

Mine has a life expectancy of roughly 9 years plus some according to the test programs I've run.

I still use spinners as you all know, I have a total of 3 TB of storage in spinner drives; two 1 TB Samsung as external storage in a Sans Digital MobilStor JBOD case and two 500 GB Samsung in my desktop case.

 

[Mychael]

By the time my spinners wear out who knows what will be around.

 

[TrainableMan]

The pricing of them may be somewhat of a "scam" but I don't believe the use of SSDs is a scam. I can picture it easily as plugging in a huge thumb drive internally.

 

[Mychael]

From what I've read currently there seems to be only 2 major drawbacks (price notwithstanding) of SSD.
The first being it's hard to clone from a spinner to a SSD due to the way files get written and secondly erasing but useing an overwrite program (apart from degrading it's life) is not all that effective on a SSD as again it rotates where it places it's data.

 

[WindowsGeek]

Hmm... I have been thinking about moving my laptop over to an SSD and giving it a fresh install for quite some time now, ever since the 80-or-so gig HDD filled up, which was a few months back.

I have wanted an SSD because spinners do wear out and can be rather loud, also they drink your battery even when you are not using the drive, because they do have to spin constantly. I do like the thought of having a 1TB drive in my lappy, but currently I do not think they are ready. Adding to that thought is what Trainable said - Scorpio Blue drives do get bad reviews. I would rather pay the extra buck on another drive for the peace of mind that I don't have a piece of junk in my system. I'd wait a bit for the products to become more mature, perhaps other companies will release their versions. Personally, my drive loyalty goes to Seagate's Barracuda or Maxtor's DiamondMax. Those drives are currently in most of my systems, and they are ultra reliable.

I think I will be going for SSD tech in my laptop for only these reasons: Less noise, less heat, longer life and no moving parts to kill your drive when you accidentally drop your laptop. Those are the only reasons I can see that make SSDs worth it.

 

[Kougar]

Windows Geek, you forgot much better performance in that list

I use and swear by SSDs for the system responsiveness. Explorer loads faster, modern systems can boot within as little as 20 seconds, and application load times are often halved if not better. SSD's certainly are expensive, but people used to pay more than $1 per GB for 10,000RPM Raptor hard drives too just a few years ago... and that was for a marginally more responsive system. Storage has long been the slowest part of a computer system, and while this is still the case with SSDs, they have made exponential leaps in performance in this area compared to a regular hard drive.

As for WD's laptop 1TB hard drive, it's good to see the areal density catching up with the desktop models. But I personally see no use for it... I don't store data on my laptop and never will, anything over the first 100GB would never be used. I'd already use an SSD in my laptop except it's a pretty old beast with an IDE interface. Given a laptop gets tossed around pretty well during travel or even regular use, keeping anything stored on laptop just seems like a bad idea.