Hardware (5183)

Western Digital now shipping WD Scorpio

Whopping 250GB 2.5-inch SATA mobile hard drive

21 May 2007 15:41 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Western Digital has today announced that they are going to begin shipping the WD Scorpio, a Serial ATA 2.5-inch mobile hard drive for laptops (and other portable devices) that has an industry-leading 250GB capacity.

To put this into perspective, it means that this 0.117kg drive can hold approximately:

71,000 digital photos, 62,000 MP3 music files or 6200 uncompressed CD quality songs, 19,000 hours of digital video or 100 hours DVD quality video or for the early adopters out there; 30 hours of HD video.

In addition to the impressive capacity, the Scorpio is chock full of Western Digital's proprietary technology to improve performance.

WD’s exclusive "WhisperDrive" combines state-of-the-art seeking algorithms that mean the Scorpio is one of the quietest 2.5-inch hard drives on the market while the smooth motion of the "IntelliSeek" reduces power usage by more than 60 percent compared with standard drives and lowers vibration.

WD's "ShockGuard" technology protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks and the "SecurePark" moves the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface which means less head wear which means improved long term reliability.

The Scorpio also claims to be fast, with 5400 RPM spin speed, 12ms access time, and a (maximum) transfer rate of 1.5Gb/s even the most time-poor among us should be happy with these speeds.

The WD Scorpio costs around £115, link to the site below.